Steemit Business Intelligence: Benefactor Rewards Analysis

The Benefactor Rewards feature was implemented in Hard Fork 18. This allowed authors and developers to split the rewards by redirecting all or part of the author reward bit to an account or list of accounts. This can be used in both posts and comments. The Benefactor Reward is given Steem Power.

In this post by heimindanger, he spoke about how any steemian can do this without the technical knowledge required via the use of Steemwhales.com.

Delimitation

This will analyze the monthly trend of the Steem Power payout from the implementation of Benefactor Rewards till December 23, 2017. I will also show the Top 20 beneficiaries and benefactors. In the process of doing the data-mining there was an inflection point between October 2017 and November 2017. I will show look into that as well and create a comparative analysis between October 2017 and November 2017 data closer.

I used arcange's Steem SQL Public Database to acquire the data-points related to benefactor rewards from the VOCommentBenefactorRewards table.

Methodology

Having no earlier view of the VOCommentBenefactorRewards table structure, and being confident that the data won't be huge that it can fit in an excel spreadsheet, I did not run a specific query and just ran:

SELECT *
FROM VOCommentBenefactorRewards (NOLOCK)

From the raw data I added three additional columns to align the data in pivot and get the variables I wanted to use in this analysis.

To get the month and year date format from default date time format, I used =TEXT(timestamp,"mmm-yyyy")

To get the value in vesting shares and remove the word VEST after the value in the reward column I used =LEFT(reward,LEN(reward)-6), and finally to covert the value in Steem Power I used the conversion VEST to Steem of steemdollar.com and excel formula =vesting shares/2050.0274

The Analysis

Benefactor Reward Monthly Trend

Note that since the December data is not complete, the data was extrapolated by dividing the result by 23 (number of days data is available) and multiplying the result by 31 (total number of days in December)

As shown in this chart the Steem Power from the Benefactor Reward is generally in an increasing trend, there are few month-specific anomalies. The chart below shows increased use of both eSteem App and ChainBB which are among the known platform in the Steem blockchain implementing benefactor rewards between the months of May and June. The next inflection point showing the Benefactor Rewards doubling between October and November. I created a section specific to this towards the end of the analysis.

Top 20 Beneficiaries

Most of the beneficiaries in the top 20 are platforms within the Steem blockchain or delegators/operators of the platforms. utopian.pay which is part of a key change in the Benefactor Reward system of utopian.io already made it to the top 20 having been implemented for only ten days when the data was generated.

esteemapp is a mobile application in the Steem blockchain operated by good-karma.

dtube is a decentralized video platform in the Steem blockchain operated by heimindanger.

chainbb is an experimental forum in the Steem blockchain operated by jesta.

Top 20 Benefactors

someone is a China based author always specifying other authors from China as beneficiaries between July to November.

jesta operates chainbb.com.

steempostitalia is a communal account of Italy-based Steemians.

What Happened in November?

The utopian-io account was account was created on the 28th of September, one of the first posts in utopian.io is this post from elear on the 29th of September. utopian-io started getting delegation as early as the mid-part of October, but got among the biggest delegation from ned and misterdelegation at the start of November.

In November, freedom surpassed both dtube and esteemapp as top beneficiaries. freedom is known to be one of the first delegators of utopian-io. ned and misterdelegation can also be seen in the chart to the right as top beneficiaries because of their delegation to utopian-io (before ned opted out from the benefactor rewards of utopian-io).

I highlighted the beneficiaries related to utopian-io in green on both October and November charts to show how the benefactor rewards for using utopian.io created the inflection point in the whole benefactor reward system between October and November.

Conclusion

In this post from elear he detailed his thought process behind bringing utopian.io to life with the main objective of rewarding contribution to open-source projects. He detailed how delegators to project will be incentivized. He did not exactly used Benefactor Rewards, but that's essentially what he was referring to. In his own words:

Why someone in the world would ever donate for an Open Source project when they can just copy the code?
Instead of a standard donation, Utopian will most likely provide a way to delegate power to the project owner and to the contributors based on the following principle.

20% of delegated power will go to the project ideator/owner.
80% of delegated power will be shared between the project contributors based on their contribution rank for the project.

Delegating power gives a way to donators to earn a fixed income, thus making it an attractive investment and will give to project owners and contributors the ability to earn higher rewards.

By providing a way to earn rewards/income from the contributions, Utopian aims to provide a new form of work compensation, a new meritocratic economy from which everyone will benefit immediately.

The implementation of Benefactor Reward opened tons of possibilities in supporting project developments within the Steem blockchain and beyond. Like what elear clearly stated in his post, the operators, contributors, and investors are all incentivized in the process.

I see the trend presented here as just the beginning. There are tons of potential to leverage this part of Steemit development into many other things both to continuously improve Steem and Steemit, and in leveraging the system and technology to solve other challenges humanity is facing through incentivized contribution to innovative ideas.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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