I have seen all the fire and smoke briefly that the last MB team post has made. Regarding the 1.5% referral bonus for existing and new users, plus the 0.5% for those who are already users and sell a vote in these days.
Also, the lovely marketing hook that the alleged 2.7x return for every SBD in MB. All, to be honest, sounds great in the paper, now I wonder what the reality is.

To make a quick test, I have transferred 10 SBD to MB to try the hype and see how is working practically.

Well, apparently is not as smooth as it was mentioned in their last post. As you can see above, I have tried with three different amounts, and immediately the system rejects it due to a lack of vote sellers for those sums. I know, this can happen, and sometimes occurs at SmartSteem, the difference is that MB tries to allocate one vote per bid, when SmartSteem will use different vote amounts for our payment, resulting in more than one vote most of the time, at the same price.

I am a guy who likes objective data and not only talking about "my team" or the other one, Hive account@therealwolf knows that I will tell him if we are not doing it right.

So, I did the same trial for one of my posts; here below the results.

I got 0.282 back, so I paid SBD 0.718 and got this;

14 Votes for a total value of STU 1.615, which is 2.2493x what I paid.

Same as above let's try the allocation of votes for the equal amount which I used for MB.

Sent 0.5 SBD got back 0.282, so I paid 0.229.

I got 22 Votes for a total value of 0.515 which represents a return of 2.2489x.

Let's go for the last round, 0.1 SBD which represents the alleged strength of MB, the minnows sector, as you all know minnows spend around 0.1-0.05 SBD in average per post, and usually not more. That is the niche that MB is trying to tackle the most, while SmartSteem focuses on dolphins, Orcas and Whales (mainly as sellers not as users).

As expected this value gave me the highest amount of upvotes since as in real life Steem is made out of a pyramid where the largest basement is made out of minnows with an SP below 25. Those (I was one just two months ago) who their vote is only 0.00, still represents something and these are my dearest followers, the one who always vote 100% organically and make comments.

The amount of votes is so high that I can not put it in normal format, so you can just believe me or make zoom. According to my SmartSteem profile, I have received 55 upvotes for a total value of; STU 0.225, or 2.25x.

This proves that my hypothesis was correct, minnows represents the more significant portion of vote sellers also in SmartSteem.

For what we have seen so far, this looks like a K.O. for MB. I still consider they have some good things, like the support to the minnow community and their large team holding the whole project. In this case and just looking at my numbers, looks like there is no other result but a clear win for SmartSteem. They may not have a higher ROI of 2.75x, no 1.5% referral percentage, no 0.5% bonus for early users, but hey, what good is all that if the tool is not working as expected.

Most significant is the philosophy behind each project. Since I do not know anyone personally from the MB team, I will not dare to talk about what is unknown to me. For SmartSteem I can say that we look for quality content, that we support Curated Authors, which are pushed to get Whitelisted to receive higher upvotes, we work with other cleaning teams to ensure that spammers and plagiarists or abusers stay away from our tool. In the end, I think that is more important than the numbers.

I encourage all users to keep supporting both tools, I believe we will take separate paths, our strengths and weaknesses are different. New Steemers will find their preferred one, as others will like to taste both. Competition is healthy, and as long the platform keeps attracting a variety of new people we are on the path.