Are you confused about curation rewards, how they work and how you can earn more of them? In this post I will attempt to explain it simply without going into details too much because we do not have a master's degree in Mathematics!
How curation rewards work is very complex and attempting to explain it with mathematical formulas can only confuse us even more. Nevertheless, there is a good post you may want to read if you want the formulas and graphs to explain how the whole thing works:
Curation Rewards Explained Simply!
Curations rewards are paid in Steem Power when you upvote posts and comments. If you look at a post that has received its rewards, you will see that there are Author and Curators rewards.
This post is 7 days old and just received its rewards. The total is $27.47 with 75% going to the author and 25% going to curators. $6.29 went to curators who upvoted the post.
Now, what you would like to know is how much curation rewards you can get when upvoting a post and what is the best time for it.
Basically, Steem rewards people for curating content early on, but not too early, and it's very complicated.
When you upvote a post during the first 30 minutes it is published, part of the curation rewards go back to the author. This is what is explained in the FAQs.
I wrote about this here: When is the Best Time to Upvote on Steemit?
Unless you want to give back some of your curation rewards to the author, you should vote after 30 minutes. Ideally the best is to be in the first 5 upvotes after the 30 minutes for maximum rewards.
As I understand it, this should look like this after the 30 minutes limit if everyone as the same amount of SP and vote at 100%:
- curator 1: $1
- curator 2: $0.90
- curator 3: $0.80
- curator 4: $0.70
- curator 5: $0.60
- curator 6: $0.59
- curator 7: $0.58
- curator 8: $0.57
Curators that come after are getting less and less and that's why autovoters are set to 30 minutes by default and also why hardly anyone upvote your posts after 24 hours. Curation rewards for upvoting comments work in the same fashion.
Also, it is better to vote for authors that have more rewards on their posts, because curators get more rewards too. Getting 25% of $1,000 is better than 25% of $2, and if you are in the first 5 after the 30 minutes, it's even better.
All the calculation becomes very complex as all curators do not have the same amount of SP, voting power and vote weight.
This is a headache and I personally do not care about the curation rewards I would get. I just put several authors in my autovoter with a vote weight of 15% to 50% to make sure my voting power always stay at +95% and I set the timing at 35 minutes. I might get a few more cents voting at 30 minutes, but is it worth the trouble?
I also vote manually posts and comments and I absolutely do not do it to maximize rewards. I think time is better used writing a good post than trying to vote at the right time.
If you want to estimate your rewards, you may be interested to try this tool:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/curation_calculator.html
Just enter your username and the link to the post or comment you want to upvote or have already upvoted.
In this example, I upvoted at 15% weight and the post already had a value of $87.34. It is now at $98 and I will get 0.001 SP for this.
You can play with the slider to see your curation rewards. If the post is at $500, for example, I would get 0.002 SP.
You can use the tool before you vote so you know the rewards you would get.
Now, I use Steemnow.com to see the curation rewards I get.
There you can see what you earn for each action and you can decide how you want to increase your rewards.
Now, that's the curation rewards I got in total on Steemit.
As you can see that's very little and my strategy is not a good example to follow if you want to maximize your curation rewards. I mainly upvote minnows and authors I appreciate and also everyone that comments on my posts. I chose to reward people regardless of rewards as my time is better used writing good content.
If you are looking for an autovoter, you may want to read this post: Unlimited Free Auto-Upvotes with SteemAuto and More!
If your voting power is running low, you may want to read this post: I Finally Got my Voting Power Back!
In this post, there is a section about Steem Power, voting power and vote weight: Understanding Steem, for New Users Only!
In this post I show a tool that is very useful to monitor your voting power: A Tool to Monitor your Reputation, Voting Power and Steem/SBD Prices.
I hope that this post is useful for you and that you now understand curation rewards better.
Would you upvote this post and follow me for more because this will encourage me to continue writing more posts explaining Steem?
Would you please help @jerrybanfield become a top 20 witness because you can help funding projects to build Steem as explained here? Vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses. Read the 5 reasons why I'm voting for Jerry Banfield as a witness and how to vote in my post.
Michel Gerard