It can be easy to dismiss the few cents you get as a curation reward for your upvote, but you need to remember that your cents add up!
I'm not a whale or dolphin by any means. At the moment of writing this, I have about 650 Steem Power in my account. But when checking my weekly curation rewards, I noticed that my estimated curation rewards last week were $2.474 SP. Multiply that out by 52 weeks, and it comes to $128.648 SP.
That is an annual growth of 19.8%!!!
This is double or triple what typical investors look for in an investment!
On top of that, this simple calculation doesn't even include daily compounding. If you check your account daily, and add the funds to your Steem Power, the percentage rate will only go up.
Even further - if you are long on the price of Steem going up, the investment is even more worthwhile.
Using Streemian
I currently use Streemian to follow a curation trail, so I don't even have to worry about getting all my votes in each day. And since the curation still leaves me at around 80% voting power, I still have reserves to upvote content that I find manually.
So, if you follow a curation trail like @SteemTrail or @Curie, you can do a great service to the community overall, while still increasing the value of your account.
Using SteemVoter
@SteemVoter is another service I am currently looking into. (See my previous post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@abishai/steemvoter-for-dummies-a-tutorial) Here you can select a custom list of user accounts you want to upvote. It is essentially creating your own curation trail, investing in the users you want to support.
Getting your feedback
I know that I am only one user, and I haven't mined the data to see what others are getting as a return on their Steem Power investment. I would be very interested to see what annual ROI you are getting through curation. If you're doing better than 20%, I'd be very interested in hearing what you do for curation.
Thanks!