Hello Steemians,

Since coming on Steemit two months ago I have experimented with bots, but I am really unsure whether they are profitable or not. It is well known that the actual bot vote itself is in general not profitable, but do these bots bring extra exposure, leading to further upvotes or do they just inflate the payouts?

There seems to be two camps here on Steemit - those who think that bots are a great tool for minnows to gain more exposure, and get seen by more Steemians, and those who are completely against them. Im not here to argue either way on this, I am just interested to see whether using bots is indeed profitable or not.

The experiment

I decided I would like to try an experiment to see what is more profitable on Steemit - bots or no bots. So what I am going to do is have a week using bots on every post (excluding memes, freewrites and #captionthis posts - I will explain why below), and then have a week bot free and compare how profitable each week has been. I generally aim for at least one post a day.

Note - I decided to exclude memes from this because for me they are just a bit of fun and I don't believe in using bots for memes. Similarly with freewrites, they are part of a community and I feel bad upvoting them with bots. Lastly the #captionthis contest I do I pay ALL of the SBD of the post as prizes so this would not be profitable to use bots for.

Week one - bots - some rules

So the basic rules for week one will be that each post will be upvotes by a bot for between 1 - 5SBD within the first hour of being posted (sorry im only a minnow so that's all I can afford!). The reason for this is that many Steemians suggest that doing this gives your post the most visibility and the most chance of reaching the ‘hot’ page, and thus being similar to a paid promotion. I will also use at least 1 resteem bot per post.

I will try and use a variety of different bots, but will obviously try and use the once that looks like it will be most profitable. Screenshots of each bot purchase and ROI will be included in my final report.

The cost of the bot vote, and the payout will both be calculated on the price of Steem and SBD at the time the vote is purchased - this is to avoid any discrepancies due to the prices changing (going up!!)

Week two - no bots - rules

So for the second week the only bots that are allowed are unpaid bots, such as Minnow Support Project, and TeamNZ as they should not have any effect if they are used similarly both weeks. No resteem bots will be used in the second week either.

It will be interesting to see what I find out and after week one is up I will provide an update as to how much I have spent on bots - the actual profitability calculations will have to be after all post payouts are received.

I am going to start off by using a bot on this post!

Thanks for reading - I look forward to providing you with updates on this.