The Mathematics of Success on Steemit: What it takes to make a living with your vlog or blog

I’ve already done this before in a very unusual field (astrology software) and this was when the internet was first being born. Having a first mover advantage helps so if you’re getting started right now on Steemit, you’re ahead of the pack in terms of your chances for achieving success on this platform. It is significantly easier to get started here than on a platform such as YouTube or your own website under your own domain names, but don’t expect to get by without a lot of work.

For perspective, keep in mind that it can take years to develop a successful following on the internet regardless of where you start. A few might get lucky and achieve instant success, but this is like winning the lottery. For real sustainable success you need steady habits. Consistency is one of the key properties to success. This is especially true of blogging or vlogging. If you’re like @dan and also write software, you can maybe get away with a post a month because the software you write impacts a large crowd of people. If you’re not like him, then you’ll want to post between 2 - 4 times daily.

(@zoidsoft Oct 1997)

I started writing software in the mid 1990’s, but it wasn’t until about 2006 that I reached the point of actually generating enough income to quit my regular job. I have written well in excess of a million lines of code in my lifetime, but I maintain a refactored code base of about 400,000 lines in the FMX environment and about 330,000 lines in the VCL environment. Under my own domain names, I have written approximately 1400 articles myself. This traffic was the basis in the late 1990’s for my success on the web. By 2001 I was getting approximately 2500 unique visitors per day and about 6000 - 8000 page views daily.

In 2001, I didn’t really have much of a product though (Zodiacal Aphesis 1.0 came out in late 1997 and was $15.00). By the end of the year I had written Timaeus which I sold for $12.95 as shareware. It got pirated lots and didn’t generate enough income to pay for web expenses, so I paid out of my own pocket to make up the difference for those years to keep the website going from my wages on my regular job. I did this for more than 10 years before it was able to pay me back.

(Rober Schmidt speaking at the 2006 PHASE Conclave)

Finally in Aug 2006 the PHASE Conclave put my software on the map and I achieved widespread recognition for my work in the field. I was making more than $1000/day at that conference, but it wasn’t quite steady yet. The following month I made only $1200, but in October, despite declining sales, I took the chance and quit my regular job of over 21 years. Making the jump to full time CEO refocused my efforts and I was finally generating a steady income of about $1500 / month. I had significant savings set aside, so I just cut my expenses as much as possible.

It was at this point that my habits changed. I no longer did much of anything other than promote my software business and think about code. I cut the TV cable fall of 2006 and have never gone back. No more wasted time and very little TV for several years after that point. I was never a user of Netflix either. But I did use YouTube (what little I could get through my slow connection). In order to keep taxes down, I used all my conferences as business expenses and lived mostly on the road. I had a small RV attached to my truck at this point, but later sold the RV because it was costing too much (gas was about $5.00/gal summer 2008).

The Mathematics of Steemit

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To break this down logically, I’ll assume you’re not as frugal as I am. I can live on a budget under $1000 / month because I live in a house built around the time of the civil war that has been in the family for generations. It’s never seen a mortgage as far as I know. I only pay rent (called taxes) to the federal government. Government authorities like to call it “home ownership” but stop paying your taxes and you’ll soon find out who really owns your property.

A single person probably needs at least $3000 / month to live reasonably. This is obviously larger for famlies. This means that on average, you’ll need to make at least $100 USD / day every single day while blogging on Steemit. If you post 4 times a day, you will have to get about $25 / post in USD. Since Steem is actually significantly more than a dollar, this will have to be figured by the exchange rate.

You should elect to have 50 / 50% payout between SBD (Steem Backed Dollars) and Steem unless SBD’s fall significantly below the value of 1.00 USD. The only time it makes sense to power up 100% Steem is when the value of both Steem and SBD’s fall below $1.00 USD. By taking 50% Steem, the other SBD’s will be paid out as if they were worth $1.00 even if they are worth $2.24 which is the current price, so you’ll more than double the payout using SBD’s.

The Dunbar Number and it’s Effect on your Follower Base

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It’s important to know that you’ll have varying degrees of engagement from those who follow you on Steemit. The vast majority of followers are really just hoping to get a follow back (the follow for follow and upvote for upvote crowd). These people are new and show their ignorance by using such schemes. Also the spam comments are more likely to get flagged than upvoted, so steer clear of these habits on Steemit. While these numbers might look impressive, they aren’t truly meaningful and the reason why is the Dunbar number.

It’s a well known sociological fact that the number of people who we can comfortably interact with is around 150. In a group of this size, it’s possible for everyone in the group to interact with everyone else. We might not do so every day, but in a small town that has community involvement such as school and church we can reasonably expect to know details about nearly every single person in that group over a span of time that involves a few months.

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Some people are of course quite famous for something notable and may interact with more people, but it’s hard for these people to expand their involvement much beyond the Dunbar number. For this reason, do not waste much time with the whale accounts here if you want to have long term success. They’re overloaded and can’t respond to everyone who wants a piece of that fortune.

If you’ve been on Steemit for a while, you’ve probably noticed that some accounts always upvote whatever post you make. They’re probably using a delegation bot to do this, but you got added to the list probably because of something good that you did on the platform. The reality is that the vast majority of your follower base will not see your posts. Expect to have less than 10% engagement even read through the first paragraph or go past the first minute in your vlog. It drops significantly after about 30 seconds of vlogging.

Many accounts that will follow you also have very little voting power and are either minnows or redfish. You are considered a dolphin once you reach a Steem Power of 5000+. There’s a handy tool from Steem World you can use to find out what Steem power generates a given payout.

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Notice the Simulate SP button at top right. At the current price of Steem my upvote is worth about $0.40 when voting power is 100%. This regenerates at the rate of 20% / day and a full upvote at 100% will cost 2% of your voting power. This means that you can use a full upvote between 10 - 12 times daily. On Steemit, self voting is generally frowned upon and can get you flagged if your content is seen as not worth the payout. I generally upvote my own articles and generally don't upvote my own comments. It's better if your altruistic side displays here on Steemit, but as a matter of cold hard mathematics, the minimum SP that you would need to upvote yourself at $100 / day is around 50,000 SP (Steem Power).

Would it make sense to take out a business loan to create such a blog or vlog? Maybe. But you probably wouldn't achieve much of a following or grow significantly if you only ever upvote yourself. To get 50,000 SP at todays Steem prices would cost about $150,000 USD. You would of course be gambling that the price of Steem doesn't tank. However, this really isn't that risky compared to the vast majority of business ventures. It's well known that 90% of all businesses fail in their first year. I've also contemplated selling some of my bitcoin to increase my SP here on Steemit, but I just find letting go of bitcoin really hard to do.

The better approach is to organically grow your following by active engagement and developing your follower base over a longer term. I currently have 867 followers listed, but this number isn't really accurate. The number you need to pay attention to is the average number of upvotes you get per post on your blog. That's your true follower base. I currently make between $1 - 2 per post with about 15 to 25 upvotes per post. If one extrapolates that distribution which is fairly typical of someone with a stated follower base of about 800, I might average $10 - $20 / post with about 8000 followers, or more accurately 150 - 250 upvotes..

With the current distribution of SP, you will probably have to attract the attention of at least one whale or about 10 dolphins to your blog / vlog. Vlogs generally do better especially right now because DTube is in the early days. More people generally appreciate well put together videos than read. So if you present well in that way, you may want to focus your efforts on vlogging.

I suspect that long term, this platform will grow, so it's important to understand that the SP that you currently have is likely to be worth much more down the road. Some Steemians such as @taskmaster4450 project Steem to be worth $100 / SP. If that happens with my account as it stands with about 1770 SP, that would mean an account value of $177K. So start blogging or vlogging. The worst that can probably happen is that you make a little more than your FB posts (which is nothing).

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Donations (public bitcoin address):

3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv

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