Steemit Business Intelligence: Benefactor Rewards Analysis (Follow-Through)

Details

The analyst did a similar analysis in December to show the Trend and Distribution of Benefactor Rewards. A lot of things happened since in terms of new frontend apps getting created, huge delegations from known Steemit Inc. accounts to some of the popular apps, and the shift from use of Steemit in terms of posting nearly 70% of the time in December 2017, to a growing share of posting from other apps leaving Steemit with less than 60% of posting share in February 2018.

Outline

To highlight changes from the earlier analysis linked in the Detail Section, this analysis will look at the following data-points:

• 11 Months Trend of Benefactor Rewards in Steem Power
• Top 25 Beneficiaries Sorted by Steem PowerBenefactor Rewards
• Top 25 Beneficiaries in Count of Comments/Contribution
• Details of Top Authors/Contributors to the Top Three Beneficiaries

• Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Dtube Benefactor Rewards
• Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Utopian Benefactor Rewards
• Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Dsound Benefactor Rewards

Scope of Analysis

This analysis will study the monthly trend of the Steem Power payout from the implementation of Benefactor Rewards through Hard Fork 18 in April 2017 till March 21, 2018. The data was extracted between 10:00AM to 10:30 AM GMT. The analyst will also take a closer look at the top beneficiaries and benefactors.

Tools

The analyst used arcange's Steem SQL Database to obtain the data related to the Benefactor Rewards using the VOCommentBenefactorRewards table. Variations of the below query were used to put together this analysis:

SELECT
    VOCommentBenefactorRewards.benefactor,
    YEAR(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp) AS [YEAR], 
    MONTH(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp) AS [MONTH],
    Count(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.benefactor) AS [Incidents],
    Count(distinct VOCommentBenefactorRewards.author) AS [Contributors],
    LEFT(reward, LEN(reward) - 6) AS [Vest]
FROM
    VOCommentBenefactorRewards (NOLOCK)
WHERE
    YEAR(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp) = 2018 AND
    MONTH(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp) > 0
GROUP BY
    VOCommentBenefactorRewards.benefactor,
    YEAR(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp),
    MONTH(VOCommentBenefactorRewards.timestamp),
    VOCommentBenefactorRewards.reward

_{Note: After removing the extra characters "VESTS" from the rewards column, the strings defaulted to text format. The analyst used the transform function to convert the strings to decimal in Microsoft Excel 2016.}

• The parameter [YEAR] was changed to 2017 to obtain the monthly data for last year.
• reward column was removed to obtain accurate distinct author count.
• author column was added, and delimited the query by benefactor to obtain data related to the top author per beneficiary (top 3).

The data were aligned using Microsoft Excel 2016's pivot, and the charts were built via Microsoft's Power BI.

Results

There's been a steady growth in the benefactor rewards in terms of count of authors posting their contents in apps with benefactors (or specifying beneficiaries themselves), number of contents posted with specified beneficiaries, and Steem Power rewarded. Between April 2017 till February 2018, there's been 188,000 Steem Power rewarded as Benefactor Rewards.

The pie chart in the lower right hand side highlights the growth showing nearly 50% of the total Benefactor Rewards from April 2017 to February 2018 were given between January and February 2018. Note the huge delegation from known Steemit Inc. accounts went out to dlive, dtube, dsound, dmania, and esteemapp which are all frontend applications in the Steem Blockchain (collecting benefactor rewards) between January and February 2018.

Top 25 Beneficiaries

When the analyst did a similar analysis with 2017 data, esteemapp, dtube, and chainbb (in that order) were the top 3 in terms of SP gained through benefactor rewards.

• utopian would have been number 5 then if the benefactor rewards of utopian-io, and utopian-pay were combined, it is now second in 2018 so far.
• steepshot was number 7 in 2017, it would have been number 5 in 2018 if benefactor rewards for steepshot, steepshot.pay, and steepshot.fund are combined.
• dsound was top 11 in 2017, now at number 3.
• dmania now at top 5 if steepshot was to be moved to top 5, was not even part of the top 20 in the 2017 analysis.

In terms of count of post/contribution, the frontend applications available through mobile are at the top as shown in the chart below.

Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Dtube Benefactor Rewards

This chart shows the top 25 contributors to Dtube's benefactor rewards. The pie charts to the left shows that over 31% of the benefactor rewards are generated from just a little 4% of the posts/contributions from these 25 author. In total there were 11,394 authors from whom dtube collected benefactor rewards from.

Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Utopian Benefactor Rewards

There were a total of 3,432 contributors to utopian between January 1 to March 21 who generated benefactor rewards. The top 25 (0.73%) gave 14.15% of the total benefactor rewards for utopian. At least 8 of the top 25 are known supervisors or moderators of utopian.

Top 25 Authors/Contributors to Dsound Benefactor Rewards

With 2587 Steemians who generated the whole benefactor rewards for dsound, 1% (25 authors) generated almost 40% share. d-pend is regularly posting his poems and reciting it over dsound, danieldyemusic is posting his singing performances, while drkent is a musician/music enthusiast sharing his pieces and great finds in dsound.

Conclusion

Benefactor Rewards created a facility to compensate developers and groups who are contributing to having diversity and variety in the ways contents are posted in the Steem blockchain. There are varying opinions about it; those who are new in the platform thinks of it as operators taking their earnings, while more seasoned Steemians understand why it is needed. I think this system will continue to grow as more apps are created, and posting activities are spread wider between the many front end apps. The Steemit Inc.'s delegation is pushing the benefactor rewards higher, while at the same time making sure that contributors are getting rewarded.

I may be a little biased, but the data suggests that utopian's distribution of rewards is the best amongst the top 3, which can be directly attributed to the moderation system. dtube is manually curating contents, and dsound seems to be doing the same.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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