Time flies when you are having fun! It's been a week now since I posted that I would be experimenting with the Bid Bots to see if one could create a self feeding cycle of voting collateral.
We now have seven posts to take a look at. I am utilizing the data from steemworld.org to take a look at where we stand as far as post payouts at this point. It is important to note that none of these posts have paid out yet. They are all still in position to have upvotes, or downvotes added which will influence the final payouts, and the rolling average of Steem price will mean the actual payouts will fluctuate from these numbers.
So here's where we sit. As a reminder, all of the posts above were bid up with at least a bid of 10 STEEM or SBD to Buildawhale. With the exception of one post (Rebalancing the Portfolio) the Buildawhale bid was the only bot used. In the Rebalancing post I also sent a bid to appreciator when steembottracker showed a profitable window for that bot.
Bids were all placed within 12 hours of the post being published, again with the exception of the appreciator vote.
In the chart above, you can see that I sent 65 STEEM and 30 SBD in payments to the bots. In return, my post payouts come to 115.46 SBD in liquid assets and 28.91 Steem Power to my account. This does show a profitable return, though the liquid return is only slightly above what is needed to sustain the bids for the next week. But 28 Steem Power is a pretty decent return, and I can supplement the SBD with post rewards from other posts to continue the bidding process.
Follower Count:
I have gained almost 50 new followers this week, and dropped 2 existing followers. Most of these are extremely low SP new accounts, and many appear like they are likely bot accounts, but it has pushed me almost to 2000 total followers.... Which is nice.
Week 2 Changes
The biggest change I will be making in week 2 is to delay the bid by at least 24 hours. This will increase the number of people who can earn a curation reward from the bot vote. More people getting rewarded with curation benefits is a good thing to my mind. Look at the bottom of each post for my estimate of when I will send the bid in to Buildawhale so you can get your vote in before the bot vote comes and earn curation rewards.
The other change I will be making is that I will be rolling vote values. With a track record of profitable bids, the idea is to increase the bids, and thus increase the SP rewards. I'm not sure if I will be able to up all bids this week to 20, that is the goal.
I understand that if I keep down this path that I will start seeing $50 posts and become a great friend of 
So far, this is a successful experiment, so we will keep rolling along with it. Let's see where things go for the next 7 days.
Happy Bidding!
The Bid for this post will be put in sometime after 4pm Central Time on Sunday, 5/6.