About a month ago I decided to join @upvoteshares and bought two shares of level 2. Now that one month has passed it is time for a review and to decide whether or not to increase the number of shares I own.

Source: @upvoteshares

What is Upvote Shares?

Upvote Shares (@upvoteshares) is an experiment that aims to provide daily upvotes to shareholder based on a predetermined model in a way that should be fair, extremely transparent, scalable and sustainable over time. The @upvoteshares account is split up in equal shares that each represent a minimum daily upvote % from the account. All shareholders will get daily upvotes based on how many shares they own. The amount of shares and the price of each share are directly linked to the Powered Up SP in the account. There are many mechanisms in place that increase the value of each share over time.

More information can be found in the Upvote Shares Terms & Conditions.

Buying shares and fees

One month ago I bought two Upvote Shares for a price of 3.320 STEEM (+ 0.300 STEEM entry cost fee) each. When you exit the scheme, you can sell your share with 0.200 STEEM exit costs. If I would like to exit now I hence would have "lost" 1 STEEM on fees.

Rewards from received upvotes

It is always hard to pinpoint how much upvotes from a certain account exactly yield. I will use two tools to make a good estimation.

First, Steemworld shows me how much author rewards I received the last 30 days. Though this is not exactly the same period as I received the upvotes (because payout takes place 7 days after posting) I use this as the best guess.
Below you can see that I received about 14.500 STEEM in author rewards last month (assuming an average SBD/STEEM ratio of 1).

Source

Now, It is time to determine how much of that rewards came from @upvoteshares. Steemreports has a nice tool to do this, which can be seen below. It turns out 4.1% of the value of my incoming votes were from Upvote Shares. Taken the total rewards of last month into account, that is equal to 0.595 STEEM.
Given that I bought the shares for 6.640 STEEM, the annual Return on Investment is 12 (months) x 0.595 / 6.640 = 108%.

Source

But there is more. When I joined I also got sponsored a place on the @minnowshares list (by @stimp1024) for as long as level 2 was active. In this period the upvotes from Minnow Shares were good for 1.7% of my upvotes, which means an additional 0.247 STEEM in author rewards.

Overview

When I put all data together, the following can be seen:

• Fees paid/to be paid: -1.000 STEEM
• Result of one month of @upvoteshares upvotes: 0.595 STEEM (ongoing as long as I own the shares)
• Result of one month of @minnowshares upvotes: 0.247 STEEM (only one month and thanks to an external sponsor)
• Net result after one month: -0.158 STEEM
• Return on Investment: 108% (only taking upvotes by @upvoteshares into account)

Conclusion

Based on these data I would say that the Upvote Shares initiative/experiment is a great way to increase the value of your Steemit account. There is a little "loss" in the buying and (eventually) selling of the shares, but the Return on Investment of 108% is quite impressive. This is even more impressive when you take into account that I posted relatively little last month (because of my holiday). When you post - and get upvotes - daily the monthly rewards and ROI will be even higher.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough STEEM to buy a level 3 share, but I definitively will save some STEEM for level 4!

Special thanks to @costanza, who came up with the idea of Upvote Shares and is working hard to keep it going. Keep up the good work!