My Thoughts on Bidbots and in an Effort to be Transparent

There are two subjects I'd like to blog about today and one is bid-bots and the other is being transparent about using them.

Bit-Bots and Buying Votes

Making money from your posts on Steem isn't easy. You have to write good content that people want to read, but because of the way that Steem is set up with its trending pages with vote value as opposed to number of votes, and because votes have a monetary value attached to them, it’s easy to get to the trending section if you spend a lot of money on a post. You can of course get there without buying votes or using bid-bots, it’s a lot harder to do. I have myself twice thanks mostly because of the lovely Hive account@curie curators and community.

For Those Who Don't Know

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, there are three main services that is on offer on Steem by third party bots (and communities) where you can spend your hard-earned SBD on to promote your posts and buy votes. They are as follows:

• Post ReSteeming - You send them SBD or STEEM and they resteem your blog post to their followers.
• Buying Votes - You can either buy a single vote or a group of votes with a value slightly above the price you pay. Minnow booster sells single votes (from what I've seen, sending them around 1 SBD) and SmartSteem sells you a group of many smaller votes. These two examples that I've used.
• Bid-bots - You can send bids of SBD or STEEM to bots and depending on how many people bid and the total value during the bidding period (usually 2.4 hours), votes are distributed based on your percentage value of the overall pool. Depending on the number of bids and the value of all bids, there is a possibility that you'll make a loss. This usually doesn't happen, but the value of the vote's SBD value you get after curation could be lower than what you sent.

Since I'm new to Steem and I want to get firsthand experience on how all the different systems work, I've been trying out these services to assess whether I want to use them in the future. I haven't been doing any systematic testing and I don't have enough data to make an assessment on how profitable each of these services are.

In general, however, I haven't been making my SBD back that I've spent on these services but have come out net positive when taking any SP gains into account. I think I've only made an overall lose on a single day in the past two weeks. All spending on each post was below 5 SBD and usually around 1 - 2 SBD.

Steembottracker

steembottracker.com is an excellent service for assessing a large variety of bid-bots. The total vote value for each pool is in all ranges from the 20 - 30 SBD all the way up to 1500 SBD from Hive account@postpromoter. The site tells you which bots will refund invalid bids, bots that only accept STEEM as payment, whether the bot will post on your post about who and how big a vote was used and whether the bot's operators keep a portion of the bids for other projects. It also shows a range of different post resteeming bots as well.

While the site is good, I have a problem with using this service. Most of the bids that I've entered using steembottracker have gotten very weak returns because the pools of each bot I've used have been filled to the brim, lowering everyone else's returns. Maybe it’s because the bids that I've made are usually the minimum allowed, but it’s entirely out of my control. Even when waiting till the last minute to place a profitable bid, there are other people doing the same forcing the whole pool to lower rewards.

From what I can see, many of the bots don't have a minimum ROI after curation at all and there are a few that cap the minimum ROI in the negatives. I have my own thoughts about why these bid-bots don't guarantee a positive ROI after curation. It simply comes down to the way they're structured. A large majority of the voting power comes from delegated SP and much like a publicly traded company, these bid-bots are selling a service, but are beholden to their delegators. Not ensuring a positive ROI after curation maximizes profits for the delegators. I'm not making a judgment about the way this is and I'm not even against it, but it’s important to know that this is the case and do your research about the bots your using beforehand. Some are operated by communities doing good work on Steem.

Being Transparent

Being transparent about the use of this service should be made baseline for all users, in my opinion. I'm not against anyone using them or making bank while doing so, but this should be considered with trending page algorithms i.e. vote value from bid-bots are deducted from the value that is used to rank these posts. I understand that this is a tall order. Hive account@transparencybot does do this declaration by posting on all posts that have over 50 SBD in bid-bot votes already.

While I'm not on Steem primarily to make money, I do see it as a valuable investment of my time and a little of my own cash for the future. From what I can see Steem is an excellent place to do so. I usually spend around 2 - 3 hours on most of my blog posts (getting tougher and tougher to do as I have university exams coming up) and I've purchased around 35 SP using my other crypto-assets, mostly ZEC and BTC. I've also used a portion of my profits from mining on my single GTX 1070 from the previous week to buy STEEM as well.

I'm new on the platform so I still don't get that much engagement on my posts but that's what I'm hoping to get more of in the future. I will be continuing to post until that happens and for the foreseeable future.

Plan Moving Forward

Based on a limited set of data, since I don't have that many posts yet, I've been calculating my ROI after Curation. They are as follows using all posts that have already been paid out as well as a snapshot of pending payouts as of 27/04/2018 20:00 PM GMT+1 using these exchange rates (it is important to note that this does include votes from non-bid-bots as well, but since this value as a percentage is negligible they haven't been removed. I am very grateful for these votes however!! THANK YOU!!):

Currency	USD
STEEM	4.20
SBD	3.57

These values are taken from an app on my phone called CryptoCurrency.

Totals for all Posts

	SBD	SP	USD	ROI
Total Revenue	80.81	25.509	395.63
Total Expenses	23.343	0	83.33
Total Profit	57.467	25.509	312.30	374.75%

Average per Posts

	SBD	SP	USD	ROI
Total Revenue	5.051	1.594	24.73
Total Expenses	1.459	0	5.21
Total Profit	3.592	1.561	19.518	317.86%

To get a more accurate picture of my post promotion usage, I've removed two outliers from the two posts that were curated by Hive account@curie.

Totals for all Posts LESS Outliers

	SBD	SP	USD	ROI
Total Revenue	19.474	6.872	98.38
Total Expenses	20.354	0	83.33
Total Profit	(0.880)	6.872	25.721	35.40%

Average per Posts LESS Outliers

	SBD	SP	USD	ROI
Total Revenue	1.391	0.491	98.38
Total Expenses	1.454	0	5.19
Total Profit	(0.063)	0.491	1.837	35.40%

As you can see I'm currently making around 35.4% profit per post while losing and average of 0.063 SBD per post. It is important to note that this isn't an extensive sample size as it’s based on 16 posts with 3 using no post promotion.

Using the above data, I have three options for what to use my current SBD value of 15.837 and pending payouts over the next week LESS curie post of 9.299 SBD. (1) Use my SBD for further post promotion, (2) selling SBD for SP or (3) cashing out to BTC or USD.

Option 1: Use SBD for post promotion

SBD to Use per Post

Current and Pending SBD	25.136
Percentage to keep for other uses	10%
Size of bid (SBD)	3.232

• Calculated for use in the next 7 days

Estimated SBD Gain

Ratio Bid/Payout	95.68%
SBD Gain	21.644
Gain Value (USD)	77.27

Left for other uses

For Other Uses	2.514
Value (USD)	21.64

Estimated STEEM Gain

Ratio SP/Bid	33.76%
STEEM Gain	7.638
Gain Value (USD)	32.08

Sum

	USD
SBD Gain	77.270
SBD for other uses	21.644
STEEM Gain	32.079
Sum USD Gain	118.32

Option 2: Sell SBD for SP

SBD to STEEM

Current and Pending SBD	25.136
SBD/STEEM	0.850
STEEM	21.366
Value (USD)	89.74

Option 3: Cash-out

Current and Pending SBD	25.136
Value (USD)	89.74

My Choice

Since I'm looking to continue to grow my account I'll be using Option 1 as it is a 31.86% gain over the other two options.

Conclusion

Using bid-bots, whether it’s good for Steem or not, make money from your posts. In my opinion I think my posts are adding to Steem, so I personally don't see that I'm abusing the system to get rich quick. There may come a time where I won't need to use these services to make any money, but for the time being I will be to get a better sense of its profitability for myself. I probably should have split this post in two and maybe used less tables, but I don't know. Let me know if it’s easy to follow or not. I will be doing this sort of calculation anyway, but if you don't think people would normally find this sort of information interesting or insightful to share, let me know. Also let me know if my math is terrible. Don't go through it for me because I'm fairly certain its correct, but if you see any glaring issues, let me know.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts about bid-bots, buying votes and being transparent in the comments below. If you want to see any more of my future content be sure to hit that Follow Button. I try to write something every day and I usually write about video games, movies and my journey through Steemit.

If you want to see any of my content from the past week, click on a link below:

1. My Curie Story: My Thoughts on Game Over, Man
2. My Thoughts on Smurfs in Gaming
3. Look! A Puppy!
4. How to Improve Your Aim in FPS Games
5. My Thoughts on Overwatch: Retribution
6. My Thoughts of Batman and Harley Quinn

Thanks again and have a lovely day!

All Images are not my own
I've spent SBD on promoting this post