Curation: How you doin'?

How well are you curating, financially speaking? Are you making the best use of your Steem Power and votes?

In this post I'm going to try and show, using some Steemit friends, a possible method to working out just how well your curation skills rank against other Steemians.

Curation and it's rewards system is a complex beast. The structure of the how the rewards are decided upon for each voter have been explained many times in detail, and here's two I found (via google search, well done @calamus056) which I think do a good job:

https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/

https://steemit.com/steemit/@calamus056/curation-rewards-explained-in-great-detail

My takeouts from the above, and general opinion is:

• Voting at 0 minutes will earn a 0.000 curation reward

• Voting under 15 minutes will earn VERY little unless you have a lot of Steem Power

• Voting between 15 and 29 minutes will earn an increasing % of the curation reward split

• The goal is to get in prior to the big hitters, but not too early in that your % in the 2nd point isn't too low (e.g. 16 minutes)

• It is commonly suggested that 25-30 minutes is the 'best' time to stick a vote in (especially on known power-authors posts because they are likely to have more auto-votes coming in at these times)

As you can see, a combination of many variables such as Steem Power, voting strength, voting weight, and time of vote, (and more) all play a part in the amount of reward received. Is there a skill to it though? And how well I am doing?

Now this is the point where this blog could crash and burn. Without a good level of knowledge of 'SteemSQL', @arcange's lovely invention, coupled with the information I've received from others in that curation data is tough to un-earth, I've used the following method to obtain what I need for this example.

• Use steemit.com Wallet to collect Steem Power and + or - the leased/delegated steem

• Use the 'Rewards' drop-down menu to find 'Curation rewards' for the previous week
  

Therefore, my data is gathered manually, and the curation period is only for the previous week. This is obviously not ideal and reduces the potential to widen the results set (maybe I can get some help with this, anyone?)

My results set is as follows:

The key columns are:

• Curation: Total curation rewards for the previous week

• SP Total: Total vested Steem Power (including delegated SP)

• Curation/SP %: The % of curation rewarded Steem Power in relation to amount of Steem Power owned

This final column is what I feel is a genuine indicator of how well you are working the curation game with the tools (including vested Steem Power) that you have at your disposal.

Imagine you have 10,000 Steem Power, and I have 1,000 Steem Power.

After a week curating, the rewards for both of us are 1 SP each.

In my mind, I'm working my Steem Power 10 X harder - If you, in this example earned curation rewards of 10 SP, then I would say we were curating with equal skill.

(If you are with me here and agree, I'm starting to feel happier about myself and the time spent working this post)

The % of curation rewarded Steem Power in relation to amount of Steem Power owned

• We have Steem Power ranging from 3.2 Million, right down to 629.
• Voting power between 42% and 100%

and

• A curation reward % of between 0.025% and 0.205%

The difference between 0.025% and 0.205% is almost 8 X more curation reward relative to vested Steem Power - quite a lot!

So what are you saying here Asher?

@osm0sis, a 6 week old user is curating (financially) more effectively than @curie, @booster, and the mighty @blocktrades, as well as our number one witness @good-karma?

I think so! But I will need some reassurance here!

• It could be that it's impossible to manage that much SP effectively with regards to curation rewards?

• @osm0sis may have had a lucky week? Yes but what about @xervantes who also has a high Curation/SP %

• Maybe all users with less than 5/6000 SP did better than the bigger accounts? Thanks @dandesign86 for ruling that one out!

• If I followed @osm0sis or @xervantes in a trail would it be more profitable than trailing @curie?

This post has raised more questions than answers to me - answers I hope you guys can help with. So before i finish up, just a few more points:

• If you have spotted any glaring errors in my post, please let me know so I can fix them (or start from scratch!)

• If you would like to be in my personal curation league (that doesn't exist just yet) let me know.

• If you have better % than @osm0sis or any other comments, let me know below.

And finally...

• I feel that curation should be about finding awesome content and giving it an up-vote, irrelevant of the curation rewards you might receive.

Thanks for reading today, comment below to help reduce my voting power further!

Asher