Well I just had my last payout from all the posts I did paid promotion on and also paid my delegations from. In that time I started with 50 Steem and 50 SBD. I ended with 50.312 Steem and 49.473. Plus I gave away something like 5 SBD to different causes in the same time.
So my net on all that was pretty much a wash, but I gained a bunch of SP so probably did come out ahead in the end. This took some doing as I would watch until the last second for bots that had a good ROI and hope nobody else would turn that amount negative.
Do think that time invested in doing that was keeping me from having time to write more content and long run I'd rather have lots of content vs a few break even posts. Going to keep plugging away and see where I am in a month.