How I Loss 44% of Post Earnings: Don't Make My Mistake!

I’ve been planning out an horror series podcast, hoping to share it on Steemit. You can find the first episode here

I had originally intended it to be hosted on @dsound, in line with the whole decentralized app thing.

I used bidbots to promote my first post. I strongly advise against doing this. I’ll explain why.

So here are the stats for my first podcast post:

Author Payout
$ 26.721

Curator Payout
$ 11.483 ( 30.06 % )

Transfer Amount (promobots)
24.750 SBD

I broke even on the transfers for promoting the post. But I lost out massive in terms of curation. Aside from the bot votes, there was little to no votes from the "#dsound" community or Steemit in general.

I think a lot of this has to do with there being such little volume on #dsound in terms of votes. That and the fact that Steemit is a dice roll of finding people that might give a shit.

The #dsound tag has the following stats:

Posts: 5,450

Comments: 19,483

Payouts: 351,701.827 SBD

Quite low. Compare to #fiction, which has twice the size

Posts: 11,445

Comments: 33,976

Payouts: 660,773.792 SBD

Moreover, @dsound takes a 25% cut out of all posts. I didn’t know this beforehand, so its my fault, but having paid to promote a first post, the expected payoff was useless.

There’s a reason for such little response, mainly, nobody cares and nobody actually listens or reads anything here (exceptions are out there, and you know who you are).

@dsound claims the 25% is for server costs and future expansions. Fair enough.

“Also part of these rewards will be used to finance the continuation of the project development, if the community finds it useful, and hire a project team if it all turns out really well.”

The transfer amount for this post was 24.750 SBD. The earnings were 26.721 SBD

My final payout had the following math:

26.721-11.483 (30% curation from bots) = 15.238 - 3.8095 (25% deduction from @dsound) = 11.4285 SBD

So,

24.750 SBD (transfers) - 11.4285 SBD (payout) = 13.3215 SBD WASTED

Or,

30% curation fee + 14% dsound fee (3.8095 / 26.721 *100) = 44% loss

The curation fees represented the largest loss of pay. The second being the @dsound deduction.

Heavily delegated, the @dsound account up votes posts using the platform, generally after a 30 minute window.

The consistency of the voting in terms of the post age (~30 minutes) leaves me to conclude that there’s little to no curation occurring. It seems instead that the voting is random.

I’m sure there’s some kind of algorithm or decision process, and although I asked @prc about this, there was no response. Had the @dsound account upvoted my post, the portion of SBD wasted would have been massively reduced.

Without an upvote from the community using the #dsound tag or by the @dsound account itself, there’s no reason to promote a post. You’ll only end up losing money.

Moreover, with such an arbitrary process of voting on content, uploading to @dsound seems hit or miss, worse than to be expected as a general rule of Steemit.

Until @dsound can explain its voting process, reduce the 25% fee, and the platform has more substantial engagement from its users, I can’t give a good reason for using it.

You certainly shouldn’t make the dumb mistake that I did of promoting a post only for it to get eaten up by ‘curation’ and @dsound’s wallet. Maybe things will change in the future. But this is the truth of the matter for now. It seems there’s some regular communities using the app. I wish them luck, but my experience has been a waste.

Soundcloud is faster and has a vastly larger user base. If you want to share a podcast on Steemit, just use a private link from soundcloud, and after your steemit post payout, make the track public for soundcloud users to find and enjoy.