6 days ago I have published my basic review of @minnowbooster services. Just before releasing it, I decided that I need to investigate DEEPER. I questioned my own voting technique and whether I was not mystifying users. I then proceeded to research my own curating behaviour and started a 4-day-long data gathering of my curation rewards. The whole experience has taught me much… so much, that I will actually release an article with all the knowledge about curating I have assembled. But now, let’s jump straight into the research.

I think that it is important to spread the information as far as we could! I ask you to up vote and Resteem in order to reach all the users that we possibly could!

The previous result of old me – the summary

So as far as I’m concerned the amount of SP generated through curation reward grows linearly with the amount of SP the account has. The premise has stayed even for the in-depth research. I didn’t really care about the votes casted by me. The only factor I was taking in account was that I tried to vote for articles when they were older than 15 mins, not to give all my reward to the author. I had found some authors that I liked and was continually voting for them. This strategy has earned me 0,309 SP per day.

The formula

I used following formula to get to know the real income I would have if I used their services.

[(A+B)/A]xC

A = Your SP, B = The delegated SP from @minnowbooster, C = Current Curation reward

I happened to have 400 spare Steem, so the calculation was done with them. If you want to get to know the whole proceeding check out the previous review, but the final formula looked like this

[(416,312 + 10 000)/416,312]X 2,163 = 54,119

That means that with my former voting behaviour I would be losing 45,881 Steem per week. After acquiring the result though I thought.

Am I doing something wrong?

Am I just smudging their services while I’m the one who sucks?

Where did that get me? The advanced research

Which posts have I been curating on?

After the first research I have started seeking blogs that would a) have the quality I demand to cast my up vote and b) be rewarding me with highest possible curation reward. I had found accounts whose reward usually grow slowly, so I could vote on them before the majority did and I also have found some accounts that are part of a wealthy trail, whose votes I have been snipping.

The plan of the research

I have dedicated basically 4 FULL DAYS to curation. By that I wanted to simulate 1/7 of the whole duration of the loan. I have given the articles from the 4th day day and half to let them gain the close-to-final reward.

I have invested about 90 Steem into SP in order to gain SLIDER! The first research was done without it and there was no way how to simulate the efficiency. If a person would invest only few Steem and would have less than 500 SP, there is no way he would profit from it. I invested in order to make the research relevant.

Counting with 20% regenerated each day, with a plan to use almost all of my voting power during the loan (because why would I keep any?). Math told me that I can spend up to 26% of my voting power per day. I actually failed to do that and have been using more than that. As we will soon learn though it did not hinder the credibility of the research

Main goal

The main goal was to prove me WRONG! Really. I wanted to make profit out of their services too. If I realized at the end of the 4th day that I was terribly wrong and it is all worth it, I would be so happy!

The new numbers

So after 4 days of intense, high-reward seeking voting I ended up with those numbers

Day 1-2: 1,17 SP
Day 2-3: 1,021 SP

That makes it 2,191 SP generated during those 4 FULL days of voting.

2,191 x 7 would make 15,337 SP for 4 WEEKS OF INTENSE CURATING. Not bad all things considered right? But…

Back to the formula

Ok so here we go again!

[(A+B)/A]xC
[(505,223 + 10 000)/505,223]X 15,337= 318,905

Final output

Bear in mind that the final output is only MY ESTIMATION of whether the loan is or is not profitable. I ENCOURAGE everyone to do their own research. Some of you may be better curators nad have different results. This research serves only one purpose – save time to those that wouldn’t have time to do one of their own.

For 400 Steem payed for @minnowbooster services I would gain total of 318,905 SP.
I have invested 4 FULL days of curating high-profit articles and it is still not worth it!
When I almost didn’t know how curating works, I was not able to make it profitable. Now when I know it and after investing half of the week into it, I would lose only slightly less Steem
I understand that it is still in a beta. I also understand that after the HF reward pool is only a fraction of what it used to be. The ratio was calculated back then and I think that after what has happened to the reward pool, ratio has to be increased.
I think that the ratio should be at least 1:150. That way I would be around 70 Steem + instead of -
Edit: As @hr1 suggested, I will make clear how much voting power I have used. The plan was to end up with 76% of voting power. If the outcome would be positive, I would try to take in account the loss I would have due to voting with lower voting power. I actually failed to follow the plan and ended up with about 65% of voting power after the 4th day and I still was in negative numbers, therefore further cutting the end number wasn’t necessary. The loss would just be bigger.