Welcome to the 41st weekly installment of my series on Steemit income and growth!
Income on Steemit is generated by "investment" (the more Steem you have, the more you earn) and by "work" (earning Steem by contributing content that adds value). Already having invested my savings in Steem, I'm now working by uploading unique valuable content to the blockchain. My first goal is to increase my average weekly income to 50 USD.
Calculating weekly income
Considering income from accounts that I own, that my wife owns, and group projects using our funds (currently @drutter, @medikatie, @greatesteem, @hempy, @girlsofgreen, @vantocan, & @sativazeee), here's the running tally:
Week 01 - 0840 (+ ? ) Steem (+n/a%)
Week 02 - 0848 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.95%)
Week 03 - 0862 (+14) Steem (+1.65%)
Week 04 - 0868 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.70%)
Week 05 - 0876 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.92%)
Week 06 - 0888 (+12) Steem (+1.37%)
Week 07 - 0914 (+26) Steem (+2.93%)
Week 08 - 0929 (+15) Steem (+1.64%)
Week 09 - 0936 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.75%)
Week 10 - 0953 (+17) Steem (+1.82%)
Week 11 - 0960 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.73%)
Week 12 - 0966 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.63%)
Week 13 - 0973 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.72%)
Week 14 - 0980 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.72%)
Week 15 - 0986 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.61%)
Week 16 - 0991 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.51%)
Week 17 - 0996 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.50%)
Week 18 - 1032 (+36) Steem (+3.61%)
Week 19 - 1040 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.78%)
Week 20 - 1045 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.48%)
Week 21 - 1051 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.57%)
Week 22 - 1059 ( +8 ) Steem (+0.76%)
Week 23 - 1065 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.56%)
Week 24 - 1073 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.75%)
Week 25 - 1079 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.56%)
Week 26 - 1091 (+12) Steem (+1.11%)
Week 27 - 1100 (+ 9 ) Steem (+0.82%)
Week 28 - 1105 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.45%)
Week 29 - 1108 (+ 3 ) Steem (+0.27%)
Week 30 - 1119 (+11) Steem (+0.99%)
Week 31 - 1151 (+32) Steem (+2.86%)
Week 32 - 1159 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.70%)
Week 33 - 1166 (+ 7 ) Steem (+0.60%)
Week 34 - 1172 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.51%)
Week 35 - 1177 (+ 5 ) Steem (+0.42%)
Week 36 - 1183 (+ 6 ) Steem (+0.50%)
Week 37 - 1196 (+13) Steem (+1.10%)
Week 38 - 1204 (+ 8 ) Steem (+0.66%)
Week 39 - 1220 (+16) Steem (+1.33%)
Week 40 - 1250 (+30) Steem (+2.46%)
Week 41 - 1264 (+14) Steem (+1.12%)
Average weekly income (last 10 weeks): +13.1 Steem (+1.11%)
Another great week of content on my blog, on @MediKatie, and on @GirlsofGreen resulted in a solid upvote return. Any week over 1% (totally organic) growth is a good week!
My account passed the 1000 SP mark this week (1015 now). Nothing interesting happened (like it does at 500 and 5000). It's nice to be able to hand out 2c upvotes during this severely depressed market. It means my team's comments have a chance of paying out, which means we can still slowly grow. Smaller accounts and teams are completely dead in the water right now, which is sad for them and for the site.
Curation awards
I've been keeping an eye on how much I make by curating (voting) here on Steemit. It seems I'm able to make 1 Steem per week, without using any bots, trails, or services to manage upvoting. I simply try to locate good content soon after it has been posted, including that of my team members. Between 15 and 20 minutes is a great time to upvote quality content. How much you make depends how much your upvotes are worth, which depends on how much SP you have. I've got 1000 SP and I make 1 per week via curation. You could say that just by upvoting I'm making 0.1% profits weekly. It's not huge but it's also not negligible.
I'm also getting a trickle of passive 'interest' of sorts, on my SP. Every ten minutes or so, it goes up by another 0.001 Steem. There's no payout notification, no memo, just free money. I think it kicks in once you hit about 900 Steem (but don't quote me on that).
Content creation is our main income, obviously, but everything definitely helps. Since we never spend anything we make, and never take time off, a graph of our total SP over time is interesting:
It's great that we've recaptured that linear rate of ascent we fell from back at HardFork20. But since all our income is rolled back in, our growth shouldn't be linear, but exponential. As we grow, our nominal gains should also grow.
Put another way: Why are we still averaging +10 Steem per week on 1250, like we were when we only had 800?
This is a problem I identified quite a while ago, but nobody has been able to suggest a plausible explanation. A couple readers came up with partial ideas but I'm convinced there's more to the story.
To add another dimension to this...
When I had 800 Steem, I averaged 10 Steem per week, and Steem was $4, so I was making $40 USD per week.
Nearly a year later, I have 1250 Steem, I still average 10 per week, and Steem is $0.3, so I'm making $3 USD per week.
So while I'm happy our hard work, dedication, sacrifice, and talent has brought us back up to linear growth...
Something is off, and more research is needed.
I wish more people would analyze their data. It's useful, and interesting (I stopped short of saying "fun").
DRutter
This is too bad. It undermines our hard and steady work. :(
You are still earning tokens. That is the important thing in the long run. The last time buying into the Bitcoin market was after the crash of 2015 at about $300 CAD per BTC. With all the wailing we hear during this year's crash those last BTC buys are still a good buy at their current $5089.44 CAD fiat price.
Just like not counting ones money when at the poker table, it helps to not convert your crypto to fiat unless your ready to cash in. ✌💛
Something rotten in Steemland?
That would be jumping to a conclusion. I think a big problems with Steemit is how complicated it all is. It's hard to figure out what the hell is going on a lot of the time, and I've been using it for quite some time. To really learn how it all works and to operate successfully in the Steemit environment you have to invest quite a bit of time and effort, and even then it can be difficult to figure out what's going on. That impedes adoption and growth. My WAG for why you are seeing a linear growth pattern: your actual ~progress~ is closer to exponential; it only looks linear because the platform itself has stalled, and with the bear market, actual use of the platform has fallen dramatically. I don't really have numbers to back this up... Alexa shows overall rank is down quite a bit over the last three months. Perhaps people are not as interested as they used to be, which is par for the course for all cryptocurrency projects.
Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=steemit shows search interest has been flat.
Side note: Look at Venezuela! That's a bright spot on the map. "que es steemit" (but even that has declined)
You leave great comments.
"your actual ~progress~ is closer to exponential; it only looks linear because the platform itself has stalled"
I'm trying to figure out what the difference is between actual progress, and how it looks.
Also, if the statement is true, then when the platform becomes hot again, will my actual progress stay the same, and only look better?
Thanks!
So, I left ~progress~ undefined and a bit fuzzy (hence the tildes) because I don't really know what the right metric is... but let's say it's something similar to "engagement", or stealing from e-commerce, something akin to Revenue Per Session (RPS). If you are making steady or even large gains in RPS, but the overall pool of sessions is declining rapidly, it might look like your growth is linear or even declining. So if the platform gets hot again, your progress would look much better. Unless the site got really hot really fast (the pool of sessions grew rapidly). Is there a way to find out what overall site traffic is? Can we look at the blockchain to help figure this out? Is there a site with stats?
This is about the best I can find at the moment. This site is a little TOO decentralized sometimes.
The two metrics that stand out to me are:
I wonder how he gets the data for these... it would be cool to compare yours to site-wide, over time.
Found some good data here: https://steemdb.com/@drutter and here: https://steemd.com/@drutter?page=133 (scroll to the bottom to see the DRutter genesis block haha).
His data is generally considered good, and I believe he's involved with collecting and handing it out. I've seen his posts about it before. From what I'e seen, it rings true. You can clearly see the damage HF20 did, for example.
If you consider cutting spam to virtually zero as damage, then yeah. 😎
Just considering post volume alone can be deceptive.