Analysis of Curation Percentage by Popularity, Size of Payout, and Date

There has been a fair amount of discussion recently on whether a change is necessary to the split of author and curation rewards. A move away from 25%/75% has been mooted, with proposals of 50%/50% rewards or a sliding scale at the choice of the author or platform both gaining traction. Both proposals would require implementation within a hard fork, so the debate may be of interest to developers as well as users of the blockchain.

One point that has been raised is, given the 30 minute reverse auction period at the start of each post life returns curation rewards to the author, is our current distribution of rewards really a 25%/75% share? If not, what is the actual percentage of curation rewards distributed?

To aid in this debate I’ve drawn up a number of statistics on the current distribution of curation rewards in order to provide some backing to this debate. I won’t enter into the arguments for or against a change to the reward structure at this point.

The main statistic I am looking at is:

curation payout / ( author payout + curation payout)

I have used the data from the calendar month of November. I have excluded all posts with beneficiary payments as the reduction of the author payment can skew the above ratio. The vast majority of posts, i.e. those published on steemit.com or busy.org, have no beneficiary payments.

Headlines

• The overall curation ratio, when considering main articles (i.e. not comments) is 18.1%
• This statistic is unchanged when considering both articles and comments combined.

Analysis by popularity

I have used total net votes on a post to define popularity.

In order to maintain credible volumes for the analysis, and prevent undue volatility in the result at higher payouts, I have grouped posts together as follows:

• Posts under 400 net votes, nearest 10 votes.
• Posts under 1000 net votes, nearest 50 votes.
• Posts over 1000 net votes, nearest 200 votes.

Net Votes (Grouped)	Volume	Curation Percentage
up to 50	462,376	18.5%
up to 100	290,752	18.6%
up to 500	349,150	17.4%
up to 5000	36,505	15.5%
Total	1,138,783	18.1%

• Ratios for posts up to 200 votes, where volume of payout is highest, are uniform around the 18% level.
• There is a marked drop in the curation rewards percentage for more popular posts. I would hypothesise that posts from popular authors receive a high volume of upvotes in the first few minutes of the post life, and thus return a larger percentage of rewards to the author.
• The bump in volumes at 400 net votes is just due to the way I have aggregated the data at higher levels.

Analysis by post payout

Again, in order to maintain credible volumes for the analysis, and prevent undue volatility in the result at higher payouts, I have grouped posts together as follows:

• Posts under $100 payout, nearest $1.
• Posts under $200 payout, nearest $2.
• Posts under $250 payout, nearest $10.
• Posts over $250 payout, nearest $50.

PayoutGrouped	Volume	Curation Percentage
up to 50	777,493	18.2%
up to 100	221,031	18.5%
up to 150	80,659	17.3%
up to 10000	59,659	17.5%
Total	1,138,842	18.1%

• The curation ratio results are pretty uniform at post payouts up to $50, even $100, with the results close to the 18% level.
• There is a reduction in the curation percentage as post payout increases, although this is less marked than in the analysis by post popularity.

Analysis by date

For this third analysis results were grouped by date of post creation across November.

• The 18% ratio is very stable across all days.
• Post payouts have increased over the last 10 days of November due to the rising Steem price.
• Post payout volumes are low on the 30 November as some posts created on this date are still to reach vesting (these posts have been excluded from the study).

Methodology and Tools for Analysis

Raw data was obtained through sql queries of the Comments table in steemsql (thank you as always @arcange!) using Valentina Studio.
Data was analysed in Numbers, the mac spreadsheet tool.
Data was obtained across the month of November 2017.

sql query

For anyone wishing to repeat this study I have included the SQL query that I applied. (I am self-taught for SQL coding).

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Query for analysis by popularity and post size

SELECT
round(comments.total_payout_value + curator_payout_value, 0) as [SumOfRoundedPayout],
round(Comments.net_votes,-1) as [RoundedNetVotes],
sum(CONVERT(REAL,Comments.curator_payout_value)) AS [SumCuratorPayoutValue],
sum(CONVERT(REAL,Comments.total_payout_value)) AS [SumTotalPayoutValue]

FROM
Comments (NOLOCK)

WHERE
YEAR(Comments.created) = 2017 AND
MONTH(Comments.created) = 11 AND
Comments.parent_author = '' and
CONVERT(REAL,Comments.pending_payout_value) = 0 and
CHARINDEX('weight', Comments.beneficiaries) = 0

GROUP BY
round(comments.total_payout_value + curator_payout_value, 0),
round(Comments.net_votes,-1)

for info: comments.total_payout_value is the author payout, not the total payout

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Query for analysis by date

SELECT
convert(date, comments.created),
sum(CONVERT(REAL,Comments.curator_payout_value)) AS [SumCuratorPayoutValue],
sum(CONVERT(REAL,Comments.total_payout_value)) AS [SumTotalPayoutValue]

FROM
Comments (NOLOCK)

WHERE
YEAR(Comments.created) = 2017 AND
MONTH(Comments.created) = 11 AND
Comments.parent_author = '' and
CONVERT(REAL,Comments.pending_payout_value) = 0 and
CHARINDEX('weight', Comments.beneficiaries) = 0

GROUP BY
convert(date, comments.created)

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Questions

If you have any questions or spot any errors please do not hesitate to leave a comment.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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