Repository
https://github.com/steemit/steem
Every month I produce a Post benchmarking report with the aims of:
• Aiding the Steemit Community with a place to benchmark their posts and growth
• Create a report that can be used for comparisons in other periods
• To track my personal targets and record achievements
Over the last few months I have added new data to this report, including comparisons to the same period last year, top earn authors and authors with the highest number of votes. This month I have added some more details on Flags.
If you missed last month’s full report you can read it here:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/april-steemit-post-benchmarking-report-blockchain-business-intelligence
Note: In last month’s report I made an adjustment for dust payments. However this adjustment was not required as the data used, already include removing dust payments. I would like to thank 
Financial Performance
May ’17 Report
April ’18 Report
May ‘18 Report
In May ’18 the % of posts with No pay-out was almost 14.55% up from 12.27% in April. Although in April ’17 this was 56.23%
The % of posts with a pay-out of <$1 is down to 63.99% from 63.62% in March. The number of posts that earned over $500 reduced from 86 in April to 66 in May.
The average post pay-out value in May ’18 was $2.73. In April ’18 was $3.18. In March it was $1.76 SBD, $2.56 SBD in Feb and $3.81 SBD in Jan. If we exclude posts with no pay-out the average post pay-out increases to $3.20 SBD. In April the average post pay-out excluding post with no pay-out was $3.63 SBD. In May ’17 these values were $7.96 SBD and $9.11 SBD.
The number of posts increased from April 18 to May 18 by 11%, although the pay-out value decreased by 4% for the same period.
However, from April ’17 to April ’18 the number of posts increased by 905% and the total pay-out value by 202%.
My Stats
With 1 less post in May than I had in April, my total post pay-out is only down $5 SBD. This month I had 8% of posts in the pay-out range of < $20 SBD and 68% of my posts earned more than $101. My posts have earned on average $49 which is considerably higher than the average post on Steemit.
Top Authors based on pay-outs
From this report we can see that many of the top earns from last month are still on the list. 
Top Category’s
The 4 top category remain the same as last month. There is some movement between the remaining categories.
In May 2017 the top 4 categories were life, kr, steemit and photography.
Comments
May ‘17
April ‘18
May ‘18
The % of posts with no comments is up from 41.35% in April to 45.72% in May. This has been offset with the % of posts between 2-10 comments.
From April ’17 to April ’18 the % of posts that received no comments increased from 37.68% to 45.72%.
My Stats
In May 51% of my post received 51+ comments. Really happy to see 3 of my posts (15.5%) received 100+ comments. That places 3 of my posts in the top 0.1% of posts when it comes to engagement via comments.
Votes
May ‘17
April ‘18
May ‘18
The % of posts with 0 net votes has reduced from 5.3% in April to 8.9% in May. However this was only 0.56% in May ‘17.
The average number of votes per post in May ‘18 was 17.72, down from 18.97 in April ‘18.
My Stats
Awesome 100% of my posts received 51+ votes without the use of voting bots.
Flags
In votes above we also have flags, however combined only 0.82% of posts had a net downvote status. Below is some further information on flags. 46.8K posts received 1 or more flags( this is posts not comments). This makes up 3.97% of all posts made. In the first table we can see the authors with the highest % of flags and after this we can see the time series for when flags were given.
Other Data
The line chart above represents the number of new posts per day in May 18 and the bar chart below that shows the peak posting hours.
Conclusion
As the price of STEEM and SBD was on a downward trend in May, this has had a direct impact in the worth of a vote and so the financial performance of posts.
The number of posts made this month was up on last month, although the number of new accounts registering was down.
It is disappointing to see the % of posts with no comments is up on last month. However from this analysis it is hard to see why this has happened. Was it the quality of the posts, or is some of it down to @Dlive moving comments of the blockchain?
If you missed the report on new users for May you can check it out here
With regards to my own data, I am really happy to see the increase in engagement and delighted with my overall performance.
So how did your posts preform in May ’18 - Please do comment below and let me know.
The Data source and Query
As always I have connected to Steemsql managed by 
for 2018 data was
SELECT author, category, created, children, total_payout_value, net_votes, pending_payout_value FROM Comments (NOLOCK) where created >= CONVERT(DATE,'2018-05-01') and created< CONVERT(DATE,'2018-06-01') and depth = 0And 2017 query was
SELECT author, category, created, children, total_payout_value, net_votes, pending_payout_value FROM Comments (NOLOCK) where created >= CONVERT(DATE,'2017-05-01') and created< CONVERT(DATE,'2017-06-01') and depth = 0I am part of a Blockchain Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #blockchainbi. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #blockchainbi team and we will do our best to help you...
You can find #blockchainbi on discord https://discordapp.com/invite/JN7Yv7j