The most difficult topic to understand on Steemit is how curation rewards work and how to curate content. This is true for beginners and veterans alike although old times may be a little more familiar with it.
Firstly the faster you are to upvote a new post the more rewarding it usually is. This may be easy as it sounds but there is more to it, so read on.
The second rule is that for the first 30 minutes after the post has been published the reward is skewed towards the author. This means that immediately after the post is live almost the entire reward goes to the author. But from there on until 30 minutes the author's reward diminishes. After 30 minutes the entire reward goes to the curators.
The third factor is the amount of Steem Power you have. For example, a person who has a Steem Power of 50000 will receive much greater rewards than someone with an SP of 500.
As you may be aware, when each vote is dispensed the voting weight declines by a small percentage. This is also taken into account while the curation activity takes place. Due to this the amount of the vote is always lower at anything below 100%, and consequently are the curation rewards.
Although this rarely happens, a sole voter on a post at the 30-minute mark will take away the entire curation reward for the post. The curation reward is 25% of the total reward for the post. Hence if the value of the upvote is 10 SBD the curator will get 2.50 SBD.
If you want to get the best reward from curation you need to invest in Steem Power so that there is a larger amount of weightage for your upvote. Another factor is the voting weight and it is advisable to keep it above 80% when curating content. Curate posts which are less visible due to it being a newer author with lesser number of votes.
In reality, people start voting on popular authors' posts within minutes of it being published. Keeping this in mind you could vote before the 30 minutes are over - say at 20 or 25 minutes. As mentioned above the authors portion of the reward keeps decreasing until 30 minutes.
A Steemit user has to take a call on when to upvote a post while aiming to receive the best curation rewards. Voting too early might mean lesser rewards than voting at 30 minutes. On the other hand voting at 30 minutes after several users have upvoted the post may also mean lesser rewards than the full potential of the reward if voting early.
Conclusion
To conclude, it can be said that you need to decide when to upvote a new post after looking at various factors like your own SP and voting weight, and the number of existing upvotes. It does involve a bit of work going through new post feeds but if you want to maximize your curation rewards it may be worth it.
If you like this post or if it has provided any useful information please upvote and resteem it.
Thanks for reading!