I lose money every time I use voting bots, 100% guaranteed. Now for clarity let me outline how I am defining a loss here. To me a loss is a total payout which is less than the SBD invested.
This gets more complicated because you invest SBD/Steem but your payout is a combination of Steem Power and SBD. Essentially any situation where the Steem power I receive is less than the equivalent SBD I lose. I.e it would have been more preferable to just convert SBD to SP on the market.
It seems to me that over the years a number of changes to the voting bot model have caused them to act more like paid advertising. One particular recent change is that most major voting bots require a minimum post age of 20 mins.
This ensures the voting bot will get their 25% curation. Now it was never an easy feat to get a bot to upvote you in the first 15 minutes to avoid losing the curation. Plus there was always the risk that other people were doing the same and a last minute SBD transfer would push the whole voting round into “unprofitable territory”.
Should bots get the curation when the voting is all paid? It’s just an additional perk for bot owners, an increase to their overall margin. When payday comes around, I find I lose circa 40% in value compared to just converting the SBD to Steem.
Many bots also have max/min ROI limits, now I have no idea how these limits are calculated. Are they based on total payout or just the SBD component? Either way they don’t seem to be working properly.
I’ve found I lose less if I use the bots at different times, so sometimes I will wake up early and post before work (UK time 7am). Even then I still lose.
I will continue to use voting bots until my SBD balance has dwindled to zero (probably in 3 posts time) as at least they do help in boosting your profile and I don’t see much point converting 20 SBD to SP as it will have a negligible impact.
What are your experiences? What am I doing wrong, or is it no longer possible to break even using voting bots?