How much bonus (bitUSD) would it take to be the most profitable pool for any and all days in the last month with the same hash rate participation?
It's extremely difficult to peg a set $ figured for this unfortunately because it varies from day to day. You can see on poolpicker.eu that we are top some days and scrypt and not on some.. same with x11. The infernopools numbers I wonder about if they are real. Nonetheless if we were to beat even them, it's relative to our mining that day. This is why part of our automated payment system is going to be set to feed in prices from all the daily reports of the pools to determine how much bonus we have to have to be even 1% above them.. though I have seen it posted as always 5% in some places. That is very rich in my opinion. Anyhow.. sorry I realize this doesn't answer your question directly, but the solution to the answer is in the development which is why I am putting priority on it over bonus payouts now.
What I can tell you is that we were more popular when we were paying out more in bonuses than we are now.
well it is not really that hard ...
for each of the last 30 days :
1)-you take the top pool (or the second best*1.01) payout and subtract your pools payout for that day;
2)- you convert the difference in 1) in USD using the price for the day(or at the end the day for simplicity);
3) the sum of 2) for the last 30 days divided by 30 is the average you will need.
The problem is that if you do not have the above estimate (or other reasonable one) it is pointless to just throw "some money" for bonuses at the pool.
The problem with that like I said is that it varies a great deal from day to day. Taking the top of the month and averaging it out isn't going to give us the # we need. Each day we are dealing with the spread of bitUSD to the market BTC that varies, and the cost of bitUSD from BTS in our conversion. Sometimes those spreads can be significant. Last night for example 1 BTC to bitUSD was $208 on blocktrades.us while the market was sitting at $245 per BTC. Meanwhile on metaexchange the spread was much closer to the market value. While everyone else is reporting their payouts in btc/mh/day average our payout is in bitUSD and we have everything setup that way. We only generate a report in that conversion at payout that day. Also days were the pool was down for a while throw off numbers. Last month in particular we were having issues with some coins causing the pool to crash.
If we use what you suggested though and did some rough conversions without taking into account a lot of the above based on the top payout of the month, we are looking at a rough 'average' of about $95 a day between x11 and scrypt.
This is why the solution is really in the programming, there are days it doesn't have to be anywhere near that much, and others it does. This is also impacted by the changing price of BTC to USD day to day which you know can swing dramatically even depending on the time of day.
As I said, the solution is in programming the system to calculate all factors that day and come out with the appropriate bonus for that day.
Until we get that dev done attempting to subsidize to make the highest payout absolute daily is really hit and miss and will end up creating days with WAY to much bonus payout with some days where it's not enough. So consider the number I gave to me a very rough estimation.