A comparison of my 'hourly return' blogging compared to curating
It's obvious that the efficiency of return on curation by autovote (CAV) or delegation is far greater than the efficiency of return on blogging (assuming you don't have a stats-bot-post thing going on), but just how much more efficient?
Below I do a brief comparison of my hourly rate for blogging, compared to curation, and then discuss whether it's worth tweaking my autovotes for a relatively small improvement in curation returns.
I took the author and curation reward stats from Hive Stats - factoring in both this account and @revise.leo. The 30 day period mentioned below is from the 28th June to 27th July.
Author rewards
As an author on Hive and LEO I’ve received the following dollar value equivalent of tokens in the last 30 days:
- $245 in Hive
- $16.61 in LEO
- Total = $261
I made around 35 posts in that period, and over the last month a post on average took me about 90 mins to research/ write/ format/ publish.
35 posts, 1.5 hours per post = $5 an hour.
So that’s $5 in voluntary donations for every hour of effort I’ve put into blogging.
Curation rewards
As a curator on Hive and LEO I’ve received the following dollar value equivalent of tokens in the last 30 days:
- $75 in Hive
- $12 in LEO =
- Total = $89
It’s actually quite difficult to work out my returns per hour on curation as I do a mixture of manual voting (MV) and auto-voting (AV), and if I were to include reading and voting manually, that’s several hours over the course of the month, and ironically those hours are lowering my return compared to the more mercenary AVing!
For the sake of ease, I’m going to be mercenary here and just assume all of my curation tokens are being allocated through auto-votes – because I’m interested in a maximum efficiency scenario, and AV is generally going to get you a higher return than MV, unless you’re a community moderator in charge of a vote trail and front run it.
Now setting up and maintaining an AV trail isn’t effort-free, because if you want to maintain a decent return rate of around 12% you need to research and tweak, and I spend around 30 minutes every month checking on some of my curation returns from certain authors and adjusting accordingly,
The main reason I spend time tweaking is because curation returns are dynamic and so they change depending on how and when everyone else votes, so I have to tweak my vote timings from time to time to keep the returns up.
NB I’m not that mercenary, as return isn’t the only reason I AV.
At around 30 minutes a month, my curation returns me around $180 per hour of effort.
OK once you factor in the initial time it takes to learn about AVing and to pick up the knowledge of who to vote for, that hourly donation rate will come down, but that initial time is fixed, so you still end up with a very high hourly rate for curation.
Is it worth doing the research to improve my AV curation return ?
I've noticed recently, thanks to Hive Stats with some sense of shame that my Hive curation return is down to 11.8% - I’m not really sure why, I’ve hardly touched anything and a month ago that was up at 14%.
(Most of that 30 monthly mins tweaking curation last month was spent looking at LEO curation returns, which are more than double that 11.8% figure.)
So, if I wanted to get my vote return back up to 14%, or beyond, would it be worth the time investment?
If I were to invest a couple of hours to simply research who gets the best return on who and then change my autovote to front-run 10-20 so 'mega auto-curators' by a fraction, I could increase my curation return by around 3%, but a 3% increase is only around another $5 a month, and I’m not convinced that increase would stick just from a one-off effort.
I also can’t be arsed to deal with gaming curation, it’s not something I enjoy enough for that little extra return, it’s really a case of diminishing marginal returns – I can earn a 12% return for next to no effort, and 15% for quite a lot more effort.
Not to mention the fact that I'd probably have to vote for people I don't actually want to vote for!
Final Thoughts
When you look at the following it’s obvious that the most efficient way to be gifted Hive tokens is to buy Hive and get curating through Auto-voting – to look at my hourly rate as an example…..
- Blogging = $5/ hour
- Curation = $180/ hour
Then it makes no sense blogging for Hive.
However, that’s a bit of a false comparison, because it’s not as if I can make more through curation by increasing the hours I put in, only by very marginal amounts of fine-tweaking, then the hourly rate comes down rapidly.
In short, there is hardly any capacity for me to earn more by curating, other than by buying more Hive. And the above doesn’t take account of the fact that some of my curation is manual, if I factored that in, the hourly rates would be very similar.
There’s much more scope for me to earn through blogging more ATM than curating, as evidenced by the fact that I’m gifted twice as much for blogging efforts as compared to curation efforts, even if it’s a much worse hourly rate.
And let’s not forget that being gifted $5 an hour for a hobby is one thing, but when Hive goes to $2 that’s $50 an hour, and that’s some serious gifting!
I also enjoy blogging, I don’t really enjoy tweaking for higher curation yields, I’m just not that good at the later! So I’ll settle for writing for donations and then an OK curation return, cheers!
Posted Using LeoFinance
