Hi Steemians! Recently I conducted an analysis of beneficiary payouts distribution over Steem account and today a want to show you my results. I hope it will provide you with a clear vision about how many apps use this feature, how many tokens they receive with it and which apps are at the top of payments. To answer this questions I collected data about all posts between 2018-01-01 and 2018-10-31.

Results

There are 9,671,014 posts made between Jan 1 and Oct 31. The most of them (6,936,438 or 71.7%) didn't have beneficiaries and less than one-third of them (2,734,576 or 28.3%) had at least one beneficiary:

Posts with/without beneficiaries ratio

Interesting that if we look at total payout value distribution we will see that posts with beneficiaries received an even smaller proportion: only 15.4% (3,728,646 SBD).

Posts with/without beneficiaries payout sum

That means that posts without beneficiaries received more valuable upvotes than posts that gave a percentage of their income to apps. And indeed, if we look into a mean total payout value in these two groups we will see that in the group of posts without beneficiaries it is equal to 2.959 SBD whereas in the second group this value is equal to 1.364. A similar pattern is observed at the distribution of a max payout value: in the first group this value is equal to 1967.32, while in the second group it is equal to 982.11

Beneficiary percent

If we look at the following plot we will see that most of the posts have a beneficiary percent less than 25:

Beneficiary percent distribution

Beneficiary payouts sum

Now its time to answer the main question: how many tokens app earned by beneficiary payouts and how these payouts were distributed between apps.

There are 1591 accounts that were set as beneficiaries at least once in the reviewed period. The total sum of all beneficiary payouts in the reviewed period is 401,249 SBD. If we look at the subset of beneficiaries who receive a sum of payouts more than 10 SBD, we will see that the 75% of such accounts receive less than 283 SBD.

Top beneficiaries

As we can see from the above plot there is a big gap in payout sum between several top apps and other beneficiaries. In fact, the top 5 apps received 87.5% percents of the total sum:

Another interesting finding is that the five of ten top apps are very specific in terms of content: Dtube, Dsound, Steepshot, Zappl and Zmania.

Also it should be noted that the amount of beneficiary payout decreased over time:

I prefer that this can be related to the situation on the crypto markets, and, therefore, to the interest to blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But this interconnection should be analyzed separately, as well as correlation with other factors, such as the total payout value sum at the concrete date and the number of posts.

Conclusion

This analysis shows several important trends in beneficiary payouts distribution.

At first, it shows that only less than one-third of posts pay beneficiary payouts
Posts that pay beneficiary payouts have a smaller total payout value than other
Most of the apps set beneficiary percent less than 25%
Most of the beneficiaries don't receive really big money, and only a small subset of apps receives the most of payouts.
At least half of such apps are very content specific and offers unique features that are not available on other platforms

Summarizing the above it can be assumed, that the best way to receive a lot of beneficiary payouts is to build a service that will offer some specific features to interact with content. But, on the other hand, such content at general receives smaller payouts than entries posted with regular clients.

Tools and Scripts

All scripts used in the analysis can be found in this Jupyter notebook
Data for this analysis were retrieved from SteemSQL database.

Relevant Links and Resources

There are some links describing beneficiary payouts feature:

Repository

steem-sigma/papers

Steem economics analysis: beneficiary payouts distribution