I thought that the contest would perhaps be a nice marketing tool if I would win. But I don't think it really helped me. So I wouldn't suggest to get rid of your SP delegation for that purpose.
9 is already a nice start. Even more important than the number of people in a curation trail is the total amount of SP. And perhaps also the sequence of upvoting.
Do you think you are somehow able to measure the increase of your own curation rewards?
I have the same thoughts regarding the contest: I think that it may help me get more followers. And it would be sweet to win 1 sbd) But I agree with you that it can also be relatively useless.
I hope that I can attract more people to the curation trail. Currently, my voting strategy involves quite a few upvotes so not all accounts are able to keep up (voting power limits). I also use 12% weight, so not all accounts are able to instantly vote due to combination of voting power issues and level of SP. Hence, the trail is not heavy at all right now and there are opportunities left for making curation rewards for new members.
I thought about that and there is a way to do that. I have a script that calculates my curation rewards, so technically I can also calculate the curation rewards coming from the trailing accounts and the rewards they are getting. It would be interesting to see how much they get and how much more I get. Yet there is not much practical sense in this right now. I think that increase in my rewards is going to be relatively small. For the trailing accounts the increase should be significant (since most of them initially have tiny rewards) but it only applies to accounts with reasonable amount of SP at disposal (say 100 or more).
Accounts with less than 50 SP are not going to get much rewards just because steem blockchain rounds the curation rewards with precision of 0.001 SP. Hence if you earn less than that you get nothing. That is pretty sad.
To have a reasonable benefit an account should have 100 SP or more and do not use multipliers for the weight of the trailing vote. (i.e. 12% vote for my 12% vote).
As I try to measure quite some of my statistics, I think we can be 99% certain that winning the curation league did not really bring in New followers.
Firstly I didn't see a sudden increase. And secondly I have the same number of followers as you. While I have written more posts and comments.
So you could even say, that your strategy works better 😀
Then you brought me at another interesting point. Your script to calculate curation rewards. That is really valuable information, at least I would say so. If you share it in a post, you probably get like no reward. So I suggest to never share it.
This feels like a strange thing, that it might be better to keep knowledge secret then sharing. Is that the way Steemit is supposed to work?
I think I have a moderate flow of new subscribers due to the upvotes. So upvoting a lot gives you this small advantage. But overal I think that my posts do not get enough exposure and I do not get an adequate interation with people.
I do not think that this is a particular feature of steemit. It is just up to you whether you want to share your scripts. I also believe that in some time all this be worthless.