I am usually accused of glorifying any latest tech or trend. I stand guilty of this on several occasions. Maybe not this time though!
If you are a user who is thinking of post-promotion, you might have heard of multiple services which will get the work done. This post is for you - and it's all about self-promotion of your well written post.
In this post I am going to draw a simple two test case comparison between the top three most talked of services namely WhaleShares, randowhale and MinnowSupport (aka PALnet) to help you.
In case you are wondering why you need these promoters, please consider this as a survival strategy in steemit. You may be a superman when it comes to writing, but could just keep getting killed i.e. no increment in terms of SBD or fanbase after every single post, simply because you don't know how to promote yourself here.
I will also try and make this post very generic so that in future, you can make this decision by yourself, should a new service come up in the future. Okay, let us get this done...
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1. Acquisition: I traded very small amount of BitShares (BTS) for WHALESHARE at Openledger. BTS was roughly valued at ~$0.35 and WHALESHARE was worth ~5 to 5.5 BTS; so simple math 1 WHALESHARE is ~$1.5 to $2.
In case of randowhale this is achieved directly from steemit UI & for PAL it is a registration needed in Discord followed by some simple steps. I have made a post of this in the past. |
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2. Cost-to-Benefit: Within steemit, for any whale to make an impact on your post, you ought to consider what their vote-worth is. Steemdollar gives you a quick run-down.
As mentioned above, the value of a WHALESHARE token stands close to $2 and you get only 1% of the remaining voting power shown against the whale. On the contrary @randowhale will definitely give your posts slightly more value for money, because you always send only 2 SBD and definitely get more than 2 SBD in return on almost any post (less than a week). Whereas for @minnowsupport, you are charged a one time entry fee of 0.001 SBD or Steem and you can keep using its resource continually. What this means is an infinite cost-to-benefit ratio! |
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3. Experiment 1: As a more realistic and useful experiment, I went to whaleshares.net, and keyed in a post less than 1 week old i.e. roughly 2 days old and had much less value linked to it (less than $1). Do note that @minnowsupport bot had already voted (at 2%) on this post 2 days ago (the first row in the table of this screenshot). So it literally gave me less than $1 even though it voted on same day when the post got created!
A Randowhale vote (at around 4.5%) even after a couple of days bumped up the number by almost 6 times i.e. my 2 SBD spend resulted in a whopping 6 SBD return (in this case)! I continued on and invested 3 WHALESHARE tokens (worth at least $4.5 at the time of this writing) and it resulted in only a $5 increment. @randowhale netted a lot better result than what @officialfuzzy could. |
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Experiment 2: On another occasion I could successfully upvote a $7 post to $15 using 3% of randowhale. Using WhaleShares I could push the value of this to $30. On the face of it both these seem like a huge boost i.e. 100% boost, however I needed 10 WhaleShares to get this done i.e. $15 spend on WhaleShares gave me a $15 boost vs with randowhale a $2 spend gave me a $7 boost.
I think one problem of WhaleShares today is it is purely a traded token, i.e. no consideration seems to be given to the remaining voting power of the whale behind it or steem's own worth! Any further increase in the $ value of this token could be detrimental to the benefits you can get of it. Consider this factor before purchasing any similar token in the future. Another factor affecting its growth is that not everyone might be familiar with the interface of openledger nor have an account in it. At the moment it is a *glorified randowhale*. But, that being said, it is the only one of the three which could see exponential growth even if two more whales join in. |
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Summary & Findings
I repeated this experiment on posts of different times i.e. more than a week and just about to cash out etc., but the above findings seem to hold true. I was personally expecting WHALESHARE token to score a LOT more, but possibly because of its current market price and officialfuzzy's own state of voting power, it did not create the necessary impact.
Pros
- WHALESHARE: Buy and store for future value increment (assuming more whales will join in). I think if the VP of @officialfuzzy improves, and your post is relatively young and already having a few hundred dollars of worth, chances are that you might see a decent increment to the $ value of the post using 20 WhaleShares.
- @randowhale: Maximum impact and easiest to use of the lot
- @minnowsupport: Infinite cost-to-benefit ratio! The chat room in discord also happens to be one of the best in terms of orderliness (of the three).
Cons
- WHALESHARE:
- Reverse case of the listed pros; it would be an assured financial loss had you purchased hundreds of dollars worth of this token and no other whale joins in this project!
- I used the site to generate a memo; I honestly don't know why they cannot use the URL itself as memo!
- Procurement and usage is most complicated of the three.
- It is also tied to one guy's voting power, which might keep going down by the day if WhaleShare catches on!
- @randowhale:
- No control of the vote percent.
- Remember not to get scammed - it is NOT randoMwhale... whoever came up with a moniker like randowhale!
- @minnowsupport:
- Lot of noise but feeble voice!
- Lot of voting restrictions as well. I think you can self promote once a day only.
- One new issue after HF19 is that if you had subscribed to minnowsupport curation trail in streemian, you tend to see your vote power drain!
Findings
- If post value is what you are after: Randowhale > WhaleShares > PAL
- If cost-to-benefit ratio is what you are after: PAL > Randowhale > WhaleShares
- If ease of use is what you are after: Randowhale > PAL > WhaleShares
Other Contenders
steem.chat: This costs you nothing to get in, but you hardly meet whales here. Post-Promotion is the channel to post your links. Trouble with the chat network is it is having availability issues of late.
Discord Communities: Apart from PAL, WhaleShares and Curie, I have also seen SteemitTalk Podcast, Steem-Speak and Steemprentice. But IMHO SteemTrail is easily the most active Discord community out there with regard to post-promotion, be it self or curation. The mods/ facilitators on SteemTrail (instructor2121 & anotherjoe are available virtually all the time and extremely friendly to help.
@steemprentice: I got hold of a link, but I am not sure whether this group or token is active anymore. They don't seem to post that often, however I see some activity in their discord channel.
Post-promotion: You might have noticed a Promote button at them bottom right of all posts. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT use this if you are a minnow. You won't get any benefit at all. Here's why:
In order for you to get into top-10 posts, you need to shell out well over $100. A month ago it was probably $30-$40. So this is NOT an option.
I hope this post was simple to read, understand and most importantly helped you make a decision as to which service you will use today. If your finding is vastly different from mine, please give a shout in the comments.
End of the day I wish to make one thing clear - these are your services only. The only real post-promotion and revenue bump can happen via the content quality of the post and the efforts you put into it.
Additional factors like time of posting, whale up-vote, follower loyalty etc. will be beneficial provided you capture the reader's attention in the first few lines. Assuming that you reached this line without skipping through the rest of this post, I hope I did just that 😉
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