This is Part 3 of a sexy three part series where I talk about an advanced ROI theory on using bots. Why the booty image?...keep reading, there is a very good reason for that.
Links to the other parts of the guide:
- Part 1: How To Use @RandoWhale, @Booster, WhaleShares
- Part 2: Return on Investment (ROI) with actual numbers , not speculation: @RandoWhale, @Booster, WhaleShares
If you read the other 2 guides, you know how to buy an upvote from the 3 bots and you also know that you lose money in terms of direct monetary return in 2 of the 3 bots. Well, are there any indirect monetary returns?
Tip Jar Effect
To understand the in-drect monetary return, let's first discuss what the tip jar effect is. I am not making up this term, the tip jar effect is a well known thing. If you have ever worked in an industry where you get tipped, you probably already understand. There are 2 main components to the tip jar effect.Sight
Getting a bot upvote is like putting a dollar in your tip jar to start the day. It looks like you already have some upvotes and dollars, which may lead to more curators viewing your post and upvoting.
Herd Mentality
If you're having drinks with 2 friends at a bar and both of them put a $1 tip in the jar, what will you do? Most likely, you don't want to be perceived as the odd ball or a cheapo so you will feel obligated to also leave a tip. This doesn't always happen, but it happens more than you think.
Steemit is no different. If a post has a lot of upvotes, it will end up on the "Hot" or "Trending" section, which will result in more views and upvotes. The post may even end up getting resteemed, which will potentially cause it to get even more views and upvotes.
Loss Leader
If you still don't follow what I'm saying, think about a store that you shop in. Stores will sometimes put something on a really great sale to get you in the door. The store may be losing money on that sale item, but they are hoping once you come to the store you will also buy other items, which makes money for the store. That sale item is what is known as a loss leader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leaderYou spending money (and losing money) on a bot vote, may entice curators to want to click and read your post. How does it entice curators? Because it looks as if you already have upvotes/dollars so your post might be worth reading.
Still want more proof that this is a real thing?
Go click on some of the "Trending" posts...what do you see? Are all the posts quality or do some look fake to you? At the risk of getting down-voted by some whales, I'll give you some examples of some that maybe look artificial:- Do you see any posts by a real restate company in the trending feeds that consistently gets over 100 votes and over $1000? There is no fucking content there! 99% of the comments say "great post". How many of you have upvoted it without even reading it because you think others will upvote and maybe I'll make some curating rewards? I have been guilty of this until one day I realized that it's a stupid of me to upvote without reading the post.
- Have you seen whales post a picture of their hotel room or just a wall and get over a 100 upvotes and hundreds of dollars? A minnow won't get those upvotes or dollars.
- Have you ever run into authors that create just okay posts and get over $200 every single post even though they don't have the followers to justify that? I don't want to mention names but it starts with @Dom and ends with Maraju. Part of it is because of friends auto-upvoting this person right around the 20 minute mark. Before 20 minutes, the posts get 2 upvotes and 50 cents, at the 20 minute mark it shoots to 20 upvotes and $200 in a matter of seconds. Because of those artificial or friend upvotes, it now shows up on the "Hot" feeds and others upvote because of the tip jar effect.
- If one of the Kardashians shows up on Steemit, how many of you think she won't instantly have the top 3 follower count? Is it because a Kardashian would write amazing blog posts? Probably not, it's because you want to see butt pics.
I'm not hating on the playa or the game!
Do you, playas...I'll watch, learn, and then post about it. And I do understand post quality is very subjective. What you like, I may think is a crap post. Either way, I'm just pointing out that the tip jar effect is a real phenomenon.
Conclusion
If you read part 2 of the guide, I showed you that the bots will not provide a direct monetary return on investment with 2 of 3 bots. The bots can, however, give you an indirect monetary return on investment by putting the tip jar/loss leader effect in play. Using the bots can make your tip jar (blog post) now looks like it has money in it and people can see others adding money to the tip jar. It's marketing 101, your choice on how or if you use it.If you do want to use the tip jar effect, don't use it on day 6 after you publish your post!
That would be like a bartender adding money to an empty tip jar 5 minutes before closing. It's not going to help you and you will lose money. If you want to get the full tip jar effect, use it early....in the first 5-15 minutes of posting.Are the bots worth it to you in the end? If you're a whale with over 2k followers, then probably not because you'll get a ton of views anyway. If you're a minnow or dolphin, then it might be worth it to you.
I don't have 2k followers or a big Kardashian booty, so I have been using the bots on just about every post. I know they are a loss leader (except randowhale past few days). But, I'm hoping it will result in more views, upvotes, and followers. One last booty pic, send SBDs to the bot army and hope the tip jar action begins...
If you missed part 1 and 2 of the guide, please see the links below:
Upvoted and resteemed for good analysis.
I think vote buying is bad for the steem economy and I would be considering dedicating my SP toward suppresing it. Right now it's it's a cool gambling experiment but I hope in the future some level of oversight is being exercised by the people selling their vote.
It would be interesting if you could come up with an article on the cost of reaching a level of exposure on Steem.
For example ratio of steem needed to be vested vs steem earned by an upvote. Some cool data could also be extracted from the numbers of views earned by a top trending post vs lower voting. So basically a distribution graph of rshares vs views on steemit.com.
I'm very interested in figuring that out actually. Going to look into that this weekend, via steemsql. Thanks for the upvote and resteem!!
While vote buying might be bad, the reality, of the situation is that anybody that invested a good amount of time into creating content, will hope to get something in return for it. If a person spends 3 days to write a thoughtful piece of content and has had no success with earning, then that user might come to the conclusion that promoting their content is equally important and hence use all of the available means on offer. The other options would be to give up on writing or scale it down along with their expectations.
I'm pretty sure that's what happens, just depends on how long an individual is prepared to keep at it. Some stop very fast and some might try and try for months, as is evident in the blogosphere in general. On the other hand the financial reward is at least in sight on Steemit.
"Do you see any posts by a real restate company in the trending feeds that consistently gets over 100 votes and over $1000? There is no fucking content there! 99% of the comments say "great post". "
@financialcritic
I wrote an entire post exposing this group that you may find interesting as supplementary reading. It's now getting flagged by some anti-self-voting nutjobs (lok1/elfspice), because he'd rather create witch-hunt bots to down-vote all self-voters than address a real spam issue.
The TLDR is they are running a whole ring of self-cross-voting whales worth over $3 million in Steem Power (at the time of writing). It's the same top 2-3 voters every time, and all the comments are basically spam too. Could very well be commenter sock-puppets to camouflage the posts as having any actual content.
(Note: Post is past payout, not attempting to self-promote:)
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
Good stuff! Glad other people are noticing it...I mean it's so blatant that how can you not see it? Will check out your post.
Haha, what a funny and informational post. Too old to upvote but not too old to praise!
Thanks!
Very informative. I use @booster and @randowhale but Whaleshares appears too time consuming to set up! Following you for more useful info 💡
It's not so bad after the setup...but def more steps involved. And more of a loss right now than the other two.
I've enjoyed all three of these. The time and reasoning alone are worth full upvotes. Terrific work.
This is great, thank you!
It would be interesting to see someone compare the gains of using the bots compared to investing in a lot of SP yourself and upvoting your own post. After reading this post I will for sure start using bots and see where that takes me.
I also feel like people willing to spend money to promote their own content would have the right incentives to produce more quality content.
Whats the point of attracting eyeballs if what you're showing off is shit ? :P
I wish that were the case! But, why produce quality content when curators are already showering your posts w upvotes. If shit produces upvotes then keep on shitting!
By the way, part 2 of the guide does compare the gains of the bots. Check it out here.
Already read all three parts (and upvoted, good stuff). I guess that it makes sense to keep shitting lol.
In the long run I still think shit will produce bad ROI. When the rewards on the platform actually reflects the amount of eyeballs ($ per view is highly inflated atm) people should generally be disincentivized from shitting all day.
I think it's safe to say everything on steemit is hightly inflated, as the value of the platform in it's current state is not 400m. This ofc is also artificially high as people want a stake in something with potential.
Good point, it should be dollar or upvote per view that counts. I'll have to do some research on the common factors that result in higher upvotes.
Not sure if Steem is inflated at $400M. If you compare it to the other coins on the top 100 list, I would argue that it's extremely undervalued. Why? Because the majority of the others aren't even a functioning product yet. If you're talking about comparing to non-crypto companies then maybe you're right...although growth social networking companies do get a huge multiplier.
Yes, I agree that valuing steem/steemit is incredibly hard to do.
It kinda falls between two chairs since one aspect is the platform (social network) and the other aspect is the croptocurreny.
I think it will be worth more over time anyways, but earnings per post is inflated because it correlates more with the amount invested in steem rather than the value derived from the amount of people reading the post. You'd have to look hard to find another platform that can reward users 1k$ for getting 2k views on any contet.
It will probably take quite a while for this ecosystem to find/establish it's equilibrium, we're still early in the discovery phase :)
Yeah, and for selfish reasons I hope growth continues to be in a steady controlled state.
Just discovered steemsql.com, will do some research!
I enjoyed all three posts. I doubt that I upvoted at the strategic time to help much but I am certainly more knowledgeable about that and the value of the bots now. I like the tip jar analogy and have a much better perspective on the purpose of Randowhale. Whaleshare/s seems way to complicated and easy to bugger up. Cheers
I appreciate it!
I appreciate your analysis on the steemit paid voting bots. Easy to follow and very well written! A bit hilarious too if you ask me. You have true talent as a writter and your posts def deserve more exposure.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
Is there any proof that purchasing votes from randowhale produced a genuine Return on Investment?
You lose money on average if you are talking direct financial reward. See part 2 of the guide where I show detailed numbers.
What I'm suggesting with this post is that all the bots can help you with the tip jar effect...but it's subjective.
You're trying to take over the hot page lol. Keep up the articles.
One day I'll make it to the "trending" page!
Bring me with you. 😀
Great breakdown of this topic @financialcritic, I've been wondering about the herd mentality thing for a while, and I know that the bots don't make a real ROI but I have noticed that the quicker I get the number up on a post, the more likely I am to get more organic votes on it. It's kind of like a better version of post promotion to me, though I find @booster to be kindof a waste to be honest. @randowhale has been good and sometimes gives an actual return.
Thanks for explaining how the voting bots work. I've been reading about them the last few days,but haven't used them because i didn't fully understand how they worked. But that has all changed now, due to reading your Voting Bot Guide,which gives a well written easy to follow guide on everything you need to now about them.
Would definitely recommend reading your guide if your thinking about using any of the voting bots.
Thanks for taking a look!
Upvoted and Resteemed by the xx_Votes_Plus curation trail! Want more earnings? Follow @dropahead in Streemian https://streemian.com/profile/curationtrail/trailing/396 and/or delegate some STEEM POWER to @dropahead! Keep up the good work!
Super useful information. I think I'm doing this by default. But it's nice to see it's the right thing to do.
Many thanks
Good article. Was a nice read. Liking the booty reference!
I wish I had some whale bot friends. Today I got lucky though on this post:
https://steemit.com/steem/@valderrama/i-wrote-this-poem-just-for-you
So it's not all only bots that can do amazing things for us :)
No doubt! Bots aren't your friends, they are a business.
I have also been noticing that the bots are incurring losses in regards to the value of their upvotes, so I stopped using them.
I never thought about it this way, but it totally makes sense to tip the jar.
Appreciated you taking time to explain this to us.
Followed :)
My pleasure and thanks!
Writing great content like this is also a great way to get upvotes and follows - well done!
Thanks!
Good post
If you catch my drift
I'm confused about one of the points you made if The reason being that a low upvote post won't generate any return for the curator. so they don't upvote, but wouldn't that upvote automatically generate revenue that they would benefit from?
My logic was that if someone sees a low upvote post, they may assume they would be the last or close to last person to upvote it. If you are towards the end or even middle of the set of curators that have upvoted, you don't get much at all. Curators get at most 25% of the total post earnings...and majority of that goes to early upvoters.
I wonder if it is practical to compile a database of info on posts with and without the bots, to try and control for factors and determine how much the "tip jar effect" is worth on Steemit.
Ultimately, even if we had the answer, it would be changing all the time.
Yeah, I think that data would be useful, but trying to figure out how to calculate it. So many bots out there, and some are part human part bot.
There is another important point. When for the post to vote any one of those Bots — that automatically raises the reputation. Therefore let the payment has no particular meaning. But there is a persistent increase in reputation.
You know, post the beginner or someone, who has at least crossed the threshold of 50, is perceived in different ways=))
"If the patron can see money already in the jar, people are subconsciously more likely to think the bartender is doing a great job and tip."
We sure are illogical, aren't we. =)
Quite clever the way you used all those images here hahaha!
It worked...... you got my vote.
I wonder is this how many of those top post that are hitting high number use to get their results. Guess the old fashion way of networking just dont cut it anymore. Are there social forums where members can link up with others to possibly increase their audience?
Steemchat and I guess local meetups? I haven't tried those yet.
I love the perspective here.
The bots have been hit or miss with my initial numbers but I definitely see a tip jar effect when I use them.
This post received a 2.6% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @financialcritic! For more information, click here!
thanks
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Good article bro. Thanks
Very good info, ty for sharing!
@financialcritic got you a $8.53 @minnowbooster upgoat, nice! (Image: pixabay.com)
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Ah! Too bad I found this within it's last 12 hours. Not that my vote is worth anything anyway. I've just started experimenting with voting bots (tried rando and booster) and I felt really lost. Thank you for explaining :) I was going to try whaleshares but my OS (or maybe anti-virus) won't let me and the online thing is giving me sync error stuff. And asking for help had someone inferring I was dumb so I decided to stick to experimenting with the other 2. Again, thanks for this. I'm clearly doing things wrong (and you made sense of why some authors are raking in way more than the other authors I've read that have better writing and less structure/grammatical errors).
Hi @financialcritic! I just edited my last post to show others this post on the psychological effect these bots have. Awesome post!
You are Fantastic man... :) Great Job!
Did you get any financial benefit in last 3 months?
We are looking for Bot Builders
http://shaivitetemple.org/Forum/topic/blockchain-bots-that-benefit-people/