Exploratory Analysis of Benefactor Rewards Shows Dramatic Impact of Downturn on DApps

 Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem   

Introduction

Benefactor rewards all Authors to share rewards with other STEEM wallet holders.  The feature is not available on Steemit.com, but you can create your posts on other user interfaces and set the benefactor’s rewards so that earning from a post is shared.

We have seen this be used a lot with DApps.  By using benefactor rewards, DApps can charge for posting via their interface.  But this option is not limited to DApps.  Anyone can author a post and share rewards by setting the benefactor rewards

Prior to HF20, all benefactor rewards were paid out in STEEM Power (SP), however after HF20, the rewards are paid out in the same ratio of SP to Liquid that the Author selects on their posts.

Aim of Analysis

With this change in mind I wanted to explore the Benefactor rewards table in steemsql to see

• How many authors have used the feature of paying benefactor rewards?

• How many posts had shared rewards

• How many benefactors have received a share of another account’s rewards

• How much has been paid to benefactors in VESTS

• How things have change over time for 2018

Scope

Initially I will look at data over all time, and then I will take a zoom in for 2018 and the top 20 benefactors in terms of rewards.

Summary

  

The above is a simple overview of the data in the benefactors table.  84K distinct Authors have made 2M posts sharing rewards of 960.28 M Vests with 3258 benefactors.

Time Series

  

The above charts show the time series of the same data that’s summarized above.

The red line is the number of posts and we can see this increase from October 17 to March 18 and in general a decline since then.

The distinct author count follows the same trend.  The blue bars show the VESTS paid to benefactor’s, and the grey bars in Oct 18, show the potion of this that was paid in liquid funds due to changes in HF20.

Beneath this we can see the number of actual benefactors, this peaked in April, a month after posts, authors and pay-outs began to drop.

Benefactors

  

The pie chart above shows the benefactors based on their share of benefactor’s rewards paid.  Combined @Dtube, @utopian.pay and @esteemapp have earned over 57% of the benefactor rewards paid out.

2018 ZOOM

I decided to zoom in to just 2018 and visualized the year to date values for the top 20 benefactors in terms of earned benefactors’ rewards.

 

The GIF shows the year to date growth in count of posts against the year to date growth in benefactors rewards earned in vests.  You will note the size of the markers change, the larger, the more rewards earned that month, the smaller, the less rewards.

We can see clearly Dtube race ahead in the rewards earned and we can also see esteemapp rise considerably above others in terms of the number of posts.

The GIF below shows the year to date Author count against the year to date number of posts.  The size changing based on the vests earned.

 

Its rather obvious from this esteemapp is way out in front in terms of usage,

This all looks rather okay really, however the time series trend shows a downturn so I though it would be interesting to view these GIFs month on month

Lets first look at the number of posts per month and the vests earned.

 

We can see esteemapp starts the year as an outlier in terms of number of posts, but by October, it has seen the biggest reduction and is now clustered with other Dapps.  Utopian.pay and Dtube also see big movements in terms of monthly vests earned.

Th GIF below really shows the contraction is usage for all the Dapps.  This is the monthly author count by number of posts and the size varying with the vests earned.

Conclusion

84K distinct Authors have paid benefactor rewards on over 2M posts , with Dtube earning by far the most.  

The downturn that we see for the usage of apps can be seen across most of STEEM and this downturn is not isolated the benefactor rewards.  However, we can see that some apps have been hit harder than others.  I think the GIFs really show how dramatic activity has reduced.

I hope over time to see more collaboration between authors, where people do guest posts, and ghost writing with rewards shared via benefactor payments.

The Data and the Query

I have used STEEMSql held and managed by @arcange to collect the data. I then used Power BI to analyse and present.

The M code used to gather the data was

let

    Source = Sql.Database("vip.steemsql.com", "DBSteem"),

    dbo_VOCommentBenefactorRewards = Source{[Schema="dbo",Item="VOCommentBenefactorRewards"]}[Data],

    #"Changed Type" = Table.TransformColumnTypes(dbo_VOCommentBenefactorRewards,{{"timestamp", type date}})

in

    #"Changed Type"