Steemit Bot ROI - A Noob's First Day Experience and Perspective

My last 24 hours has seen me experimenting with a handful of the popular bots here in the wonderful world of steemit.

These include @minnowbooster, @bellyrub, @buildawhale, @randowhale and @booster.

2 days ago, I really had no idea what they were, yesterday I spent upwards of 100 SBD promoting my posts. This is a summary of my experience with some of the bots.

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Initial Thoughts

Who doesn't want to make more money and have their posts reach a larger audience? I know I do and when I found the bots, I thought I had found the golden ticket to steemit fame and glory (and riches too!).

Oh, the naivete of noobth.

I realize now that it's a lot more complicated than I imagined. I believe leveraging the bots can still be profitable, but there is SO much to consider.

And what I cover here is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Quick and Obligatory Disclaimer

Please take whatever I say here with a grain of salt and do your own experimenting and research on each of the bots. Please don't construe any of this as investment advice, again it is just my own limited experience.

You know that analogy about the blind leading the blind... that may apply here.

Jus' saying.

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How I'm Calculating BOT ROI - Don't Forget the Curator Share!

It took me a day to figure it out, but let's remember that your profit is NOT just the difference between what you bid and the money that the upvote is worth. Don't forget that curators get about 25% of the post payout. And you are sharing/being taxed not just on the profit, but on the entire amount.

That said, gross profit would be just :

GROSS PROFIT = VALUE OF UPVOTE - BID AMOUNT

For example, if the upvote is worth $2.00 and you bid $1.50. Then your gross profit would be .50. Simple, right?

You then have to take the full amount of your bid + the profit and then subtract the curator tax of 25%. (I prefer not to think of it as a tax. Steemit's all about sharing the love, right?) Then you take that number and subtract the cost of the bid. So net profit would:

NET PROFIT = ((GROSS PROFIT + BID AMOUNT)*.75) - BID AMOUNT

Using the same example as above:

(($0.50 + $1.50) *.75)) - $1.50)

so $2.00 * .75 = $1.50 - $1.50 = 0

So, yeah, in this example we have only broken even. :(

*We made 25% on the upvote but then are going to be taxed 25% by the curators. *

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How I am Calculating Steemit Bot ROI

So to calculate NET ROI, I think we just take the NET profit and divide it by the BID AMOUNT.

NET ROI = NET PROFIT / BID AMOUNT

For example, if your net profit was .50 and you bid $2 your net roi would be 25%.

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Organic Boost - There is More to the Story

Also, I am sure there is a technical word for this that steemians much more experienced than I have probably come up with, but another consideration for bot ROI is the organic boost that a good post will get from the extended reach that the bot upvotes gives your post.

I noticed with some of my posts this organic added an additional 10-20% to the gross profit. For me, this is the most compelling reason why we should be using the bots on good content. If you boost mediocre or crappy posts, you will not get any additional organic boost.

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The Steemit Bots - My Rankings

In my limited experience of 24 hours of boosting my last week's worth of posts, these are my current rankings in terms of ROI and overall experience.

#1 @minnowbooster
#2 @bellyrub
#3 @buildawhale
#4 @booster
#5 @randowhale

Operators of the #2 - #4 bots, don't lose heart. I have positive things to say about all of your bots. @randowhale sorry, I think our friendship isn't gonna work...

#1 - @MINNOWBOOSTER

Minnowbooster has been awesome and not far behind @bellyrub in terms of my ROI. I am so happy with this bot that I am even applying to be whitelisted with them to be able to make superboosts (bids up to $100).

Minnowbooster also seems to be very consistent,with the lowest ROI I got on any of my posts a whopping 17%

AVERAGE NET ROI ON 7 POSTS = 25.3%

#2 - @BELLYRUB

Bellyrub is king in terms of average ROI. However, it is all over the place. I had one post over 100% ROI and another at a negative 20% ROI! This is why I have put minnowbooster on top.

AVERAGE NET ROI ON 7 POSTS = 26.5%

#3 - @BUILDAWHALE

@buildawhale has been hit or miss with my posts. One of my posts yielded a +.17% ROI while another was as low as a -19% ROI. All in all it has still been (slightly) profitable.

AVERAGE NET ROI ON 6 POSTS = 3.8%

#4 - @BOOSTER

I'm still waiting on a refund from @booster for a duplicate bid, but other than that it has yielded a strong ROI in my limited experience.

AVERAGE NET ROI ON 4 POSTS = 13.6%

#5 - @RANDOWHALE

However, @randowhale has frankly just sucked for me. I got a negative ROI on every single one of my bids with them!

AVERAGE NET ROI ON 7 POSTS = -7.2%

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Other Bot and ROI Considerations - Bid Sizing, Exchange Rate and Fees

Bid sizing seems to be incredibly important. Too big and the ROI goes way down, etc. I'll have to write a post just on this after I have more experience under my belt.

Also, in terms of exchange fees,I wish @BlockTrades would publish their exchange rates and fees. For example, I ended up depositing $100 USD worth of Bitcoin and somehow ended up with only $90 SBD. (When the exchange rate was around .98 USD to $1 SBD.)

Just doesn't seem right, or fair? I could be wrong with my calculations, but I think everyone would agree that there needs to be a lot more transparency with Blocktrade's fee and exchange rate structure.

From the BlockTrades website:

How We Price Conversions

Our market engine scans across many market paths over a number of different cryptocurrency exchanges to find the best price for purchasing one cryptocurrency with another one. For example, if you want to purchase BitShares with Litecoin, our system will search across more than one hundred market paths to find the best possible price at the current time and desired quantity.

That all sounds great, and it does mention that it looks for the best price, but there is absolutely no mention of their fees. Am I missing something?

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there... the reason I am writing about this is because it really cuts in to your ROI, especially for someone like me buying a very limited amount of SBD to use for the bots.

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Stay tuned for more on my BOT Experience

I am going to continue to utilize the Bots, well all of them but @randowhale. Learned my lesson there.

I will write a follow up roundup post probably in about a month with more detail on the numbers and a lot more experience under my belt.

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What Do You Think?

Thank you for reading and for upvoting, sharing, and resteeming!

I'd love to hear from the steemit community on this. Especially if I am way off-base on something, overly optimistic, overly critical or otherwise. How do you maximize your ROI with the bots?