The Real Cost of the Steemit Trending Page

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We all know the Steemit Trending Tab, should really be called the Promoted Tab but what is the real cost of the Steemit Trending Page? You might be surprised it's not as lucrative as you've been led to believe, so why do people do it?

Well, the short answer is exposure, but the longer answer is much more complex than that.

Steemit Trending Page Case Study

Just lately we've seen regular Trending Page activity from @HappyMoneyMan and he's gone all in with the traditional interview series, specifically around EOS. Which works to increase your profile by associating yourself with others and their communities.

Maybe he's invested in EOS and wants to ensure it's on the front page of Steemit (every day) or perhaps he's genuinely interested in the EOS Block Producers and what they offer to the EOS ecosystem.

Or could it simply be he's just hoping for a big fat vote from Hive account@dan the man? Either way, he's put a lot of money into these bid bots in order to get in trending every other day.

Let's see how much it actually costs to get on the Trending page in June 2018.

So this is a snapshot of the trending page a few moments ago.
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And this it the amount of SBD this post has raised after 8 hours...

And this is the amount of SBD he's sent over to the bid bots...
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Yes, that's an outlay of $606 SBD for a return of $864.90 so far.

It's hardly a great business model and looking at his recent posts that number is expected to drop rather than rise due to bid bot flagging groups and simply the decline of the SBD price.

Plus we forget 25% of that value goes back to the bid bots in curation rewards so right now that makes the numbers add up like this...

$864.90 - (25%) = $648.67
less $606 = $42.67 profit

Yes, trending is a zero-sum game if you can't find other Steemians to upvote your content. So why do people do it?

Obviously for the Exposure.

But as we can see with the Hive account@joeparys account, amassing more than 10k followers doesn't mean you'll actually be reaping the rewards with a steady flow of upvotes during the times you aren't pumping yourself with bid bots.

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Ouch!

But there is an advantage to being on the trending page and it's called SEO.

And one Steemian who has this all figured out is Hive account@yallapapi who regularly adds another 20 backlinks to previous content, not in the hope you'll read them but I suspect to improve the SEO page rank of those posts.

Yes, you should always link a few of your older posts at the end of your articles to ensure they benefit from a few extra backlinks and link juice, especially if you're regularly reaching trending where the posts are actually indexed only a few hours later in the world biggest search engine, Google.

But with thousands of daily posts on Steemit, Google's Search Engine Bots only cover the most important pages first, leaving your sub $10 post to be indexed at a later date.

So if you want to take advantage of the Long Tail of Google Search in the hope of reaching someone who would be interested in your posts, it actually pays to take that small profit, the Trending Page offers, then rinse and repeat.

But paying $606 SBD for a $42 SBD return isn't nearly as good as getting $100 SBD in genuine upvotes from the community. The problem is this is very hard to do when so many whales and dolphins are already selling their votes to bid bots owners to make small gains each time they use your vote.

Oh, and Hive account@happymoneyman if you get to read this, then consider adding links to your Top 10 previous posts everytime you post, because it's good SEO and will ultimately help your YouTube channel grow too with some extra organic traffic down the track.