If I may, have you done a comparison where you did not use the bid bot just to see? Is anyone landing on your post from viewing the trending feed? Or do you think people already follow you and/or come through alternative contest lists?
(Sorry to extend the mass, but as long as it's down at the bottom of the blog, seems okay)
Hmm interestingly, it looks like they got rid of the little eyeball view counter. But yeah, the comparison is telling. My normal, everyday posts would get around 30 views. The first time I shelled out a decent amount of money to bid it up and get it into trending, that post received 1,100+ views. People do land on posts from the trending feed... but the only way to get to the trending feed is to have a high value post, which is accomplished almost exclusively through bid bots if you're not a whale.
Oh I read about that, they were concerned it wasn't accurate anyway, but that comparison is staggering. You'd think they'd implement some rudimentary analytics for bloggers though, because that would be immensely useful. (I hear tracking pixels get cached, so those don't work).
Yeah, I've been crawling through these transparency bot to see the various use cases. I really hope there is something to address the promotion issue soon, because the bid bot solution is highly inefficient in giving a lot to bot delegators and making the payout number on posts meaningless :(