I’ve been running 
The reason for doing the giveaways was to make some steem to help fund levelling up my steemmonsters decks, and here I analyse my returns on these posts.
Headline finding - I earn as much doing steemmonsters giveaways as I do writing on steem, per hour of effort put in.
Data
To get the data below I used accusta, a handy tool which allows you to download your earnings in SBD, steem and SP (and vests) for your previous posts.
I simply cut and paste it all into excel, filtered the posts about steemmonsters, and then calculated average (for interest) and total earnings. I got the following figures:
- Average pay out per post = $0.35
- Total pay-out of all 57 posts = $14.35
Value of steemmonsters cards given away….
I had to estimate this. I usually give away cheap $0.03 common cards with every 4th post or so being a higher value rare, sometimes epic (more like ‘epic’) card.
I estimate the total value of cards given away at around $1.79 – yes I’m a tightwad.
This means these SM posts have given me a net profit around $12.50.
Qualifications
Half of my earnings is powered up as SP, so isn’t liquid funds: my liquid profit over the last two months is only around $6.
My giveaways also include SBI shares: so I’ve actually paid 57 steem (around $25) for SBI shares over the last 2 months. However, I’m not counting this as a cost, rather I see SBI shares as a long-term investment because those shares now mean that I get an automatic upvote on every post of over $0.02 and increasing.
I’ve been subsidizing my SBI giveaways with some nice upvotes from this account to
I’ve also effectively been ‘subbing’ my SBI purchases from my 
NB – I don’t actually wait until my earnings from
Is it worth doing these giveaways?
I earn about $0.20 a day from these posts, and they take me about 5 minutes to put together and reward, so that’s about $2 an hour, however if steem increase by 5 times in value, that’s $10 an hour for tossing about on the internet, if it 10 times in value, then that’s $20 an hour for dicking about on the internet.
So basically, yes it's worth the effort!
What if the cards increase in value at a faster rate than the steem I earn from doing giveaways?
That could happen, but it’s a bit moot as I’m giving away cheap cards and the trend is to use the cash generated to buy rarer cards, which should increase at a faster rate!
It’s also on a par compared to my regular posts. I earn about an average of $5 per post on this blog (maybe more, that’s very rough!), which is 25* more. Coincidentally, I probably spend about an average of 2.5 hours writing a post, which oddly enough works out at a rate of (in a totally bizarre coincidence) $2 an hour, or (if steem 5* or 10*) the equivalent of $10 or $20 an hour for tossing and dicking about on the internet.
Downsides?
The giveaway posts are quite tedious to write, even if they do only take me five minutes.
The above doesn’t count the time spent playing steemmonsters to ‘mine’ the cards, and steemmonsters can lead to a little fragmentation of the mind!
There is a risk that the cards I re-invest in end up being worth nothing, then again, so might steem, and so might the pound if we end up caught in a perpetual cycle of Brexit uncertainty.