Here are the results from my voting bot research.
For those of you who just tuned in.....
I created six posts and used the Steem Bot to determine the best upvote payout.
I placed $2.00 on each bot and each post received three upvotes.
Before I made the final payout to the Bots I double-checked the payout from the bots. They can change quite quickly and you should keep a close eye on them before you commit your SBD.
Each Bot has an upper limit which will determine if you will get a worthwhile payout.
Here is an example: For these I have used the pushup bot.
Here is what 0.25 SBD will get you. So you can see that after Curation you will receive about 0.19 payout.
This may change depending on how strong the bots voting power is. You usually won't get the full amount as the Bot shows, but if the Total Bot Value and After Curation numbers are both in the green then you should get a positive payout.
This is at 0.5 SBD
You will still get about a 0.23 payout.
This is at 0.75 SBD
Here you can see it drops off to 0.19
This is at 1.0 SBD
and again it drops down to 0.10
This is at 1.5 SBD and you can see this would not be profitable for you.
Here is a spreadsheet of my results.
I think this is pretty self explanatory
The first column on the left is the Post.
The second column is the Bots I used for that post.
The third column is the amount of SBD (they are all 2.00 SBD
The fourth column is what the post actually paid out.
The fifth column is what the Author received.
The sixth column is the total Curation rewards.
The seventh column is the number of votes the post received.
The eighth column is the average of the curators payout.
The ninth column is the percentage the Curators received.
The tenth column is the Authors total profit after the initial investment.
There are a number of factors when it comes to curation. Not all curators will receive the same amount.
For my tests I just took into account the total number of people that voted on the post. This doesn't include those who left a comment or those that resteemed the post.
I recommend reading these articles for a better description of curating.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@calamus056/curation-rewards-explained-in-great-detail
https://steemkr.com/steemit/@xervantes/how-to-earn-higher-curation-rewards
In Conclusion
I am not here to debate the moral or ethics of using Upvote Bots. Use them if you want or not.
If you upvote your own posts you will notice that not only do you benefit monetarily but the curators of your posts benefit also!
I hope you found this interesting!