Curation: How are you doing? Week 3

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

This is the third post in a series, which looks at a method to work out just how well your curation skills rank against other Steemians.

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Curation and its rewards system is a complex beast. The structure of how the rewards are decided upon for each voter have been explained many times in detail, and here are two I have 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 in the first minute will earn you a curation reward of almost 0.000

• Voting between 1 and 29 minutes will earn an increasing % of the curation rewards split, this value peaking at 30 minutes and remaining the same from this point onwards

• 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. 15 minutes - approx 50%)

• It is commonly suggested that 25-30 minutes is the 'best' time to vote (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 are you doing?

I have used the following method to obtain what I need for this report.

• 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 because of the time it takes to gather the data. Hopefully in future, we can obtain a much larger set for analysis.

This weeks results

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.

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

• Firstly, an excellent job from @dontstopmenow who tops this weeks chart - This guy is one to watch!

• Great stuff from @fiveboringgames, @biophil in 2nd and 3rd respectively

• Consistent stuff from last weeks top curator @buggedout in 4th

• Well done to @fitinfun for making the top 5 with a huge leap up the charts this week

• Another shocking performance from yours truely - I'm missing clearly missing posts from @osm0sis!

• The difference between the highest and lowest %'s is a staggering 31 X better ratio!

• The average % curation reward/Steem Power is 0.15785 this week

• It's still debatable if a very large amount of Steem Power restricts curation performance using these figures

• I consider it not very profitable if you were to trail @good-karma or @pharesim

• If a user has powered down or powered up Steem in the past week, the results will be skewed

A few points:

• If you have spotted any glaring errors in my post, please let me know so I can fix them.

• If you would like to be added or removed from my personal curation league (next weeks post) let me know

• Some Users, 'Power Users', and Whales (listed in this post and otherwise) are not aiming for max. curation rewards, and are supporting communities with their votes

• If you have any other comments, please 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

Asher