Haha, very diplomatic classification of 'other'.
I'm sure most people that don't get a regular whale vote tend to head towards the communities/Dapps for their upvotes... and I'm sure that once SMTs come in and businesses start to see the huge amount of content that could be created by offering upvotes, we'll start to see businesses in the top 500 manually curating/rewarding posts that benefit them.
Such a shame no one was collecting this data two years ago or a year ago... I'm so glad you're doing so now, be very, very interesting to revisit annually.
See, I can be sometimes :)
Yes that is something to look forward to, a bit longer to wait though....
I'm sure there was a time where the 20 manual voters would all fall into the manual curators column. Things are a bit different these days, but it's not all bad news. I'll run the list at a later date if remind me, how do you think it will look, 1-3-5 years?
Hmmm, 5 years it might be:
Nike
Coca Cola
Pepsi
Democratic Party
Walmart
Tesla
Dtube
Instagram
Forever21
Steemmarket
Super curious about 1 year away... I imagine it'll be all Dapps... STINC has a ton of SP that I'm sure they're saving to delegation to exciting prospects... I honestly can't even guess we're we'll be in a year. My guess would be that SteemCommunity is much higher up the Witness list as whales finally realise how much good you're doing on the platform to keep people engaged, which keeps them or others producing content, which keeps them invested, which keeps developers choosing the platform, etc etc.
That's a nice list, even one of those would be awesome.
I think bots and dapps will fill the 20, and suspect SC will have it harder as new witnesses arrive, cheers!
If anybody in that list, outside of both Steem apps, they will not be the brands account but at best micro-campaigns managed by their respective (national) agencies.
The biggest issue with that is that unless they tokenize their own SMT (don't bank on it until there's more legal framework available), they will first need to invest in 2m SP to stand out in that list.
That's a massive upfront investment and will require an absolutely long time for boardrooms to be convinced about such expenditure.
This is not running a microsite on Tumblr as for example Nike has been known to do.
PS: I think Wendy's has shown much more eagerness to enter arenas like these where they can "play" and build community.