That’s it, folks, I made it. 30 days ago I decided to start a 30 days writing challenge, in order to test Steemit.com, as a platform. This is the last post from that challenge.
In order to properly celebrate the whole thing, I decided that the last one should be a detailed review of what went well, what is not so well about Steemit and my overall conclusion.
Total Rewards Value: $897.84
Probably the most interesting metric of this challenge was the financial one. How much money can you make blogging on Steemit? So I kept track of every post and of every reward - you can see below the payout for my entire activity during the last 30 days. (The list is longer than 30 because I actually wrote more than 30 articles, we’ll dive into more details in the Challenges section of this review.)
If you look at my Wallet, though, you’ll see that the total value of my account is right now at around $400. That’s because Steem's price, as a currency, fluctuates based on demand and supply: when I started, 30 days ago, one Steem was $0.38, right now is just $0.11.
Even after this big price drop, there’s still significant value left, at least in my opinion. If you compare $400 with zero on Medium, Facebook or Twitter, there’s nothing more to say. Not to mention the medium and long term potential. The reason you see less money is also because I tested a few withdrawal paths to see how legit the whole financial mechanism behind Steemit was, but nothing more than 10-20 USD in total, withdrawn via various exchange channels.
Also, please be aware that this is not the total amount that went into my wallet, but the total generated, my author part is smaller. Each post has a 25% reward that is distributed among its curators. So this number, $897.84 should be read as: "I generated $897.84 worth of value, from which 75% was directed to myself and the rest was directed to curators, or people who upvoted my content.".
From Where The Money Came
My followership is rather small now, less than 150 people. Steemit has an imbalanced model of wealth distribution (which is not something abnormal, in my opinion) so the whales are the ones who can make you or break it around here, not your followership. As the network grows, your followership may have a bigger significance, but right now, if your followership is not made entirely from whales, you're stuck with minnows, and that's negligible, in terms of rewards generated.
So my money came specifically form a few whales, @ned being the first one, of course, and @charlie.shrem or @blocktrades being some of the people who upvoted my posts. But for the most parts I got votes from curation guilds, like @curie and @better. I think @curie accounted for the largest part of my income, in one of these weeks I was featured as the author with the highest rewards. Which was kinda neat, I admit it :)
The Growth Path
What you see below is the chart of my account value, as seen on steemwhales.com.
I have a few remarks.
the growth really started to happen after the 12th day. Until then, things were quite slow. That confirms one of the key factors in creating a relevant pool of value: consistency. One, two or even 5-6 articles won’t create enough of a traction. But after that, the growth rate is vey significant. The growth in the last half of the month was 4 times bigger than the growth in the first half of the month!
my first post was valued at about $338, mainly because it was upvoted by one of the Steemit founders, @ned. After that, I didn’t have anything even close to half of that payout, for any of my posts. I think this detail is very important for those who want to calibrate their expectations, especially if they have the chance to receive a warm welcome, like I did.
after 2-3 weeks I decided to power up pretty much everything I got from my articles. The reason for that became obvious after I had a better understanding of how Steem works under the hood. To put it very short, Steem Power is protected from inflation. Even if you choose to power down and cash out, you’re much better if you keep your earnings in Steem Power. I wrote more details (for the financially non-savvy people around) in this post: Steemit is a River, SBD is Bottled Water and Steem Power is a Dam. I recommend to bookmark that post and read it later, patiently.
the growth curve is pretty steep and I expect some sort of smoothing at some point, but I don’t have enough data yet. It may as well go upwards at the same rate (I won’t be upset at all if it would) but it can also slow down or even plateau at the inflation rate (if I don’t get any reward anymore, that is).
What I Actually Did Here
I wrote each and every day. The average length of an article was 600-700 words and I had around 2-3 pictures in each of them. The main topic was obviously business, since I started a challenge on business, but I also had a few trials on other topics, just to the test the waters. What surprised me, in a pleasant way, was that articles about writing, or life, generally speaking, had a much warmer reaction than the ones in the challenge. Obviously, all articles about Steemit received a lot of interest.
Like I said, the fact that I already have a successful blog - for more than 8 years now - helped a lot. I already had a writing habit and I can easily write 1000 words per hour if I’m not distracted by other, more pressing tasks. Discipline is key.
After the first 2 weeks, I also decided to join a curation project, called @steemtrail. I’m still involved in it, curating business, self-help and romanian categories, but I expect this project to be radically transformed when curation guilds will be an integral part of the Steemit platform (as developers pointed out a few times).
I also spent a significant amount of time in the chat. Because content discovery tools are pretty much inexistent at the platform level, all promotion must be done "old school" style, in the chat rooms. It’s very time consuming. But once you go over 100 followers, things are starting to become more manageable.
Challenges
There were a few logistic challenges (like squeezing time form other projects to invest here) from strategic challenges (I had to make some decisions based on how I gradually understood the platform). Let’s take them one at a time.
Time To Invest
I’m currently managing a relatively big project, a coworking space called Connect Hub, which means a big part of my time has to be allocated there. In terms of available time to invest in Steemit, I managed to do reasonably well, but only because I knew this writing challenge will last only 30 days and I pushed it a bit. After carefully evaluating the necessary amount of time to spend in order to make Steemit a relevant activity, it’s clear that it needs more time than I currently spend in these circumstances.
I should either delegate more of my workload (which I planned to do anyway) or downgrade my Steemit involvement (posting less often, etc). I didn’t make a decision yet but it would happen in the next few days (see the last paragraph).
Platform Quirks
The most important quirk of the platform is the 30 days limitation of payouts, combined with the inability to edit your posts after that period. I found out about that only after about a week spent here. That resulted in more articles than initially planned, one of them proving to be quite popular: Timeless Content versus Timely Content, Or How Steemit Can Lock Itself Out Of Business In One Easy Step. I’m still receiving rewards and comments for that one, which I find kind of ironic.
This limitation was perceived as very serious and I pondered for a few days what should I do with my posts. One option was to simply take them out and republish everything on my own platform, after a 30 days window, with a link on Steemit. But after a while I decided it’s better to let them there and squeeze as much SEO juice from them as I can. If Steemit will become popular, direct links from it (like the ones I hardcoded after each of my posts in the footer) will be valuable. If not, I can still copy / paste them and repost on my blog. Either way, it's a win-win.
And it’s always possible that the platform will allow access to them later on, so my bet is on this direction.
Another quirk is related to the user interface and overall usability. As it is right now, Steemit is not Twitter, nor Reddit, nor Medium, nor Facebook, but something that takes a little bit from everything. What it doesn’t take, though, from any of them, is their usability. It’s not that it looks ugly, which is something hard to judge, because it depends on personal preferences and taste, but there are simple features that are not implemented yet, like profile pages, walls, about pages, that are making the entire experience quite difficult.
During the last two weeks, though, we got word from founders and developers that they’re active working on these matters, which is encouraging.
Next Steps
Overall, Steemit was a very interesting experience. I’m fond of challenges (after all, I love running for 24 or 48 hours continuously) so this 30 days writing challenge felt quite well. It also proved me that the platform is working and there is a significant potential in it.
But the results of this experiment brought me to a crossroad.
I see two main directions now:
Staying on Steemit as a spare time hobby and watching it unfolding from a distance. In this scenario I will publish maybe once or twice per week and most likely drop my curating commitments. That will rebalance the time I took from other projects, namely working for Connect Hub. But will also decrease dramatically the potential reward from Steemit, both short and long term.
Finding a way to balance my Steemit involvement with the potential benefits. To be honest, that’s the scenario that seems more appealing to me. I think Steemit has what it takes to create, and even lead, a significant disruption in the content producing business. But well, my time constraint is still there. So, to put it more clearly: I need to find a way to maximize my revenue from Steemit, to the point that I could safely and consistently delegate parts of my other commitments.
After thinking for a few days, I came to the conclusion that the only reasonable solution for this conundrum will be for me to become a witness.
I will give a more detailed explanation in my witness announcing post, in the upcoming days, but just to give you an idea: I have more than 17 years of experience as being an entrepreneur in the online content publishing area, more than 4 years experience in building a live (like real life, real people, real places) community around the concepts of Open Connect / Connect Hub, I have relevant technical skills necessary to build and maintain a witness node and, what’s more important, I can create some synergy between an online, distributed community and a vibrant, real life community of entrepreneurs in a coworking hub.
It's still not a final decision, but something that has, let's say, 73% chances of becoming real.
That’s it for now, we'll see how this will play out.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
