It is well known that paid voting bots take a large part out of the reward pool every day. We, as a community, probably have different opinions on whether voting bots are good or bad for Steem, but without having an opinion, I just wanted to know how big these voting services actually are.
It is of course possible to simply add up all the Steem Power of the bots so let's do this first...
The combined voting value of all voting bots listed on steembottracker.com is currently $2,244.27 taking into account the current feed price of $2.313. But these are only the bid-based voting bots and voting services such as @minnowbooster and @smartmarket are not included. The bid-based voting services use their voting power 10 times a day so they take $22,442.70 out of the reward pool per day.
Voting services such as @minnowbooster and @smartmarket often do not upvote themselves, but use other people's accounts to deliver the paid upvotes. To include these voting services as well I calculated how much SBD and STEEM is sent to these services on a daily basis. The result is shown in the chart below.
An important note I have to make is that not all transfers are used to upvote a post. Some transfers may have been invalid and have therefore been returned. @smartmarket, for example, often uses part of the amount to upvote a post and returns the part that was not used. I had no way to calculate the total amount of invalid transfers so these are not substracted in the chart below.
Daily SBD + STEEM Transfers to all voting services
| Date | SBD | STEEM |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-03-15 | 30,590 SBD | 3,115 STEEM |
| 2018-03-14 | 41,399 SBD | 4,028 STEEM |
| 2018-03-13 | 56,602 SBD | 64,012 STEEM |
| 2018-03-12 | 47,245 SBD | 7,328 STEEM |
| 2018-03-11 | 46,584 SBD | 3,600 STEEM |
| 2018-03-10 | 56,815 SBD | 3,895 STEEM |
| 2018-03-09 | 53,491 SBD | 5,909 STEEM |
Since 1 SBD is worth over $2 us dollar the total value being sent to all voting services is over $100,000 us dollar per day. How much money are we actually making collectively every day?
The STEEM supply grows by approximately 50,000 STEEM per day, but I'm not exactly sure how much SBD we are 'printing' per day. Who can elaborate this?
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The people using the bots are breaking even and not making more money than they put in.
The bot reward is closer to 200% if you are lucky and there is not over bidding inside the 2.4 hours.
So $1 gets you $2, but on payout day you get $2.00 - $0.5 (25% curation reward) = $1.50
But then this $1.50 is split 50/50 between SBD and Steem.
That is SBD 0.75 and Steem $0.348 (Steem/SBD = 0.93)
You get less Steem because of an error in the system. SBD is pegged against USD so it is 1 USD for 1 SBD). But to get Steem it is $1.50/2/2.12 = 0.348
So you get SBD0.75 + SBD0.345 = SBD1.10
Minus SBD1 you paid = SBD0.10
You will get that if SBD stays the same over that 7 days. If SBD goes down you make a loss.
The people using the bots make little or no money using the bots.
Thank you for this information. Seems like the Bots are doing well.
If they have their own SP yes, but if they need to lease the SP not that much. There is cost of building the bot, server hosting and maintenance cost too.
@colinbrazendale - are bots worth it? Does a Minnow need bots to rise up, succeed and to earn steem? Can a person ascend without using bots?
Good questions. I've been trying to figure this out as well. So many complexities to steemit, might take a while to get the best efficiency figured out. I guess we keep digging.
It is a bit sad seeing this finding. We love Steem because it a community consisted of human being rather than bots. And now bots are collecting SBD and STEEM.
It is like an engine inside another engine. They are the turbo for steem.
Hate them or like them, they serve a purpose to fill anyone with extra sbd to bid.
That is a lot of dough. Thanks for collecting all that data. It is amazing that just two vote bots could be providing a maximum of $250,000 per day in votes ( assuming users get 2.5 to 1. Even if 50% of payments are invalid that is still an amazing number per day of $125,000 just from two sources.
At least both smartsteem and minnowbooster are actively trying to stop bad actor vote buying.
penguin has become a recognized source for steem statistics thanks!
Do you think people are auto voting on your posts? I mean you have 142 votes and only 28 views. So not everyone reads the post before upvoting. And 142 upvotes in 5 minutes is quite a high number?
There are systems you can use to upvote your favorite authors automatically. I use @steemdunk - but there are others. This way you can support people you like even if you are not always there to catch their posts.
Yes, that's right. Some people have added my account to an auto voting service such as steemvoter.com. For which I am very grateful btw. I also regularly buy votes on https://smartsteem.com which helps to give a post more visibility.
Thanks for your answer!
I have to admit that you are the most awesome poster of data, statistics and analysis.
It looks like you don't have an answer yet. I will think about it and see if I can help.
It's possible that people are viewing the post through other interfaces, and I don't think those count towards the views even if they can vote. Of course, you could be right too. I asked that same question about a post when I was newer to the platform, and that's what I was told.
Interesting, good to know that votes and views can be different possiblely due to viewing the feeds from other apps.
In most cases, the bidders actually lose...meaning if you add their SBD and SP payouts together, they would have been far better just powering up the SBD in terms of profitability. Of course, this doesn't take into account the added visibility...which is why they do it.
To me this whole problem hinges around an ineffective algorithm for both the "trending" and hot "tabs". If we users start putting pressure on Steemit and other Steem sites to change it, we can fix the problem.
If "we" make 50.000Steem per day, then we would print around 103,500SBD
How did I calculate this:
Payout SBD = 50% from payout
Payout STEEM = 50% from payout divided by steemprice (2,24$ atm)
Hope I don't have a misconception
Thank you. That seems like a good calculation.
Using a $2.20 SBD price, that makes the total rewards in US dollars approximately 2.24 * 50,000 + 103,500 * $2.20 = $339,700 per day.
I'm not sure if I get it? Or maybe something is wrong in the calculation?
In your post you stated that about $100,000 goes to paid upvoting bots. In this comment you day the total daily reward is $339,700.
That would result in 29% of the votes being paid for. That sounds really enormous 😳
That's right... It's a lot indeed.
That doesn't make sense. There are 36 whales. If about 30% of the votes have been bought, that would mean almost 10 whales are functioning as bot. My feeling says there are not so many whales acting as bots. But I didn't check this, so it's just a feeling.
but these are helpful or not for steem growth?
voting bots that are making profit aren't really necessary.
Services like minnowbooster and steemfollower are pretty much necessary for minnows to see any growth on Steem, unless you are unemployed and have all day to promote yourself through commenting and spamming. In fact, I would argue that if Steem worked more like steemfollower where you get points for upvoting others that in turn get your posts more visibility, for-profit voting bots would be a joke.
I think that @dragosroua (the author of steem.supply) can provide some more information about the reward pool and how it is evolving.
Even the current data is huge and shows how much voting bots are making from people who are trying to gain a little more visibility here. These numbers are crazy!
wow!!!
Thanks for sharing
In my opinion, the voting botes are destroying Steemit and they should take all Steem Power them and give to the people.
This is informative thanks for shearing
Wow, this is a huge amount. Are these bots also classified as whales?.
This is informative thanks for shearing
They should remove the voting bots because it is not organic and the only motivation behind them is money.
That's a lot of bought upvotes per day. I must admit that I have used voting bots a couple of times, but usually with a negative ROI. It seems to me that their main purpose now is to catapult a post onto the trending page, but that means that there's no form of quality barrier to be noticed on here as long as you have the money to buy big upvotes. I don't think they help the platform overall.
just like a website with full of advertisements, that is always bad for the website
Interesting. Are there any examples of whales with a good reputation that got there totally organically without voting bots?
Would be even more if people would know how to use it. I still don't have a clue how this works. Have sent some SBD tu @null and of course made a mistake
My thought is if 50k steem is generated a day, the number of SBD generated would roughly be 50k * (the average steem price)*0.75, so if steem average price is 2.2, then we should see about 82.5k SBD generated. Let me know if you disagree
Way too much $ wasted daily! I wish I held all my Steem Dollars from when it was a dollar and then sold them when they were worth $15 😮
The numbers are staggering!
Cool stat, so very roughly about 20% of the reward pool is sent / allocated by bots. This is a lot but then again maybe not so worrisome.
This is very informative and thank you very much for sharing this.Waiting for something new.
good post..
Great to know the amount. I always wondered how much they actually earn. Great work though
For me to use the bots is to lose part of your earnings. It is a vicious circle. In which you invest a certain amount of SBD to obtain a positive return, which will be much less when you take away the costs of healing. So far I do not see the grace. Greetings from Venezuela
@penguinpablo
Thanks for the information. From what I've gathered from your post and the comments. Will it be safe to say that it becomes profitable to use the bots only when the worth of sbd increases? I'm saying this because some days ago, I tried using the bots and because of the reduction in value, it was or it seems as though I made losses rather than gain. What do you say?
@penauthor
Oh! A lot of money that the bots gain from Steemit. I haven’t known about this before. Thanks so much for presenting the report to us. ;)
Good information. But before one can benefit from these bot the persons needs to read SB/STEEM price. If it drops that means you will incur losses and if moves up that where u will benefit. That is according to my understanding
So, just doing some calculations in my head (i am not great at that):
about 1.5% of all votes a bidbots but the value given by the bidbots is around 50-60% of the value each day? On top of this, the bidbot owners are taking $100,000 in SBD/steem per day + the curation values?
Doesn't seem like it is supportive of long-term organic growth does it? No wonder everyone else who doesn't use bidbots payouts are down.
this is very interesting and have been following a discussion which lead back to this post. smartmarket seem to have received transfers of steem and sbd that are not transfers for votes, but funding. I have started to do a little work on this myself and I might be able to make those adjustments for bids sent back.
Also wondering how you got the values for the daily amount transferred to voting services? I have values for this but they are somewhat different to yours. for example on the 15th march the SBD transferred to voting servces (for the accounts listed on https://steembottracker.com/) I have $17444.
The people using the bots are breaking even and not making more money than they put in.
The bot reward is closer to 200% if you are lucky and there is not over bidding inside the 2.4 hours.
So $1 gets you $2, but on payout day you get $2.00 - $0.5 (25% curation reward) = $1.50
But then this $1.50 is split 50/50 between SBD and Steem.
That is SBD 0.75 and Steem $0.348 (Steem/SBD = 0.93)
You get less Steem because of an error in the system. SBD is pegged against USD so it is 1 USD for 1 SBD). But to get Steem it is $1.50/2/2.12 = 0.348
So you get SBD0.75 + SBD0.345 = SBD1.10
Minus SBD1 you paid = SBD0.10
You will get that if SBD stays the same over that 7 days. If SBD goes down you make a loss.
The people using the bots make little or no money using the bots.
Duplicated reply. I've upvoted the other one and I will flag this one.