Yesterday I have decided to give another chance of the Promoted page by promoting a post that needed to get more attention and raise some awareness. The post in question was this one: Bug Report: Issues on Steemit and Different Steem Tools with IE11 where I talk about some of the issues that Steemit currently has under Internet Explorer 11 as well as cover over 10 different Steem Tools that aslo don't properly work under IE11
As a firefox & chrome user, I wouldn't even click on that based on my own interests.
As a reader and tiny curator (0.01$ worth of vote), even if you paid 1000$ for promotion, I'd still not click it. I read IE 11 and I LOL'ed (just sharing my reaction). I wouldn't have any interest in reading it or upvoting it.
Content is relevant to what will have success or not. This may not be the type of content to attract upvotes. Obviously, no meaningful conclusion can be extrapolated about the usefulness of "promoted" from that case.
On the other hand, I went over the top 20+ or so, they were like 5-6 in the 0-1$, 6-7 in the 1-10$, 3 in the 10-100$ range and 3 in the 100-1000$ range. So their ratios are decent.
The biggest problem right now, even if I have 0.01$ worth of vote, is that I don't see much good content to upvote.
Now imagine that the platform can give out thousands of dollar per day - perhaps 20-30k. We have to ask ourselves if there are 200-300 posts that can really earn those 100$ each...