The Cardano network boasts over 3000 registered pools, with the majority contributing to block production in each epoch. Operating a pool comes with its own set of costs, which can fluctuate based on a variety of factors. This article will delve into the potential earnings in ADA coins and USD for Staking Pool Operators (SPOs).
This article was prepared by Cardanians with support from Cexplorer.
Read the article: https://cexplorer.io/article/what-is-the-profit-of-cardano-spos
This article contains an error:
The fixed cost serves as the minimum reward per epoch for the pool.
If the pool doesn’t mint any blocks in an epoch, the reward for the pool is 0. Also if the fixed cost is more than the total pool reward for that epoch, the reward for the pool is just that total pool reward. In both cases this reward is less than the fixed cost, so it’s by definition not the minimum reward.
Also you shouldn’t count the rewards earned from the pledge as pool profitability, because that is just normal delegation.
You can find in the article: " Pools that have low pledges and low saturation might not succeed in minting a single block in an epoch. This means they would receive no reward."
It is fair to count the pledge as the input for the reward calculation as it increases the reward (a0) and the pledge can be attractive to stakers who decide to delegate coins because of it.
This doesn’t account for the case that fixed cost exceeds total pool reward for the epoch (which is not that far away anymore for small pools with a fixed cost of 340 ADA).
Taking into account the effect of pledge on total rewards because of a0 is something else than counting the rewards earned because of delegating the pledge as pool rewards. Almost all block explorers list this under delegator rewards, not pool rewards.