It is time to make Steem an economically self sustainable business ecosystem
@ned in his most recent post revealed what I've said months ago. Steem has to become sustainable. Ned in particular was talking about Steemit but the problem is that Steem as an ecosystem is not economically sustainable.
If every blogger is a business, if every developer is a business, if every project is a business, we want to allow all of these economic agents to have the potential to grow.
In order for this to happen the focus has to shift toward monetization and business growth.
Several of us have put forth the idea that it is time to utilize the advertising capacity to monetize Steemit and it's content.
But in my opinion this has to be done in a fair way. If all the revenue goes to Steemit Inc then this is not the fair way.
If the revenue from ads is distributed in a fair way then Steemit Inc should get some fixed percentage and the particular blogger who has the content which generates the views or hits or clicks or ad revenue should get their percentage too.
The other way is to simply use the promotion function in a more intelligent UX so that advertisers can simply buy exposure. This could be used to replace buying votes as it is set up now.
I am not an economist, but some people on Steem might be. Anyone who is an economist or who has the qualification to give input on how best to monetize Steem please feel free to blog about this topic with your ideas. The goal should be how to make Steem a sustainable ecosystem.
This is the best proposal I have seen as regards ads:
https://steemit.com/steem/@phoneinf/how-to-make-steem-blockchain-into-a-success-the-new-google-solution-by-nonameslefttouse
Post visibility is a UI level action. So, you can make the suggestion to people who are creating the various front-ends that you see around the place.
Being an idealist doesn’t really work in a realistic market. I completely agree that advertisement is the way to go, as long as it injects money into the Steem economy I think it’s a no brainer.
Do you mean to say Steem, or Steemit? If the later, are you taking about the front end or something else? You need to be careful to be very clear on that point.
I for one do not agree that advertising in any form I know of actually can be fair. It's not just about what happens to the funds, but also how it operates. The means but be fair, as well as the ends.
But you are right to look for expertise here. Resteemed to throw this question out further, and I recommend you clarify the first point I mentioned and perhaps alter the title to represent that you're suggesting an ad policy.
The STEEM blockchain won't survive without external sources of revenue. I've said this many times in the past and with the market in a downturn it's even more applicable now. The same goes for a lot of crypto's but we will see a lot of them die off in markets like this.
The apps which are being built will need to either source ad revenue, sell data or find other ways to earn money. STEEM itself is a share and can't survive unless their is a good product to give it investment value. Apps like Actifit have huge potential to generate add revenue with the model that they have. If they can mass onboard users especially with their new fitbit integration they have a target demographic of hundreds of million who use fitness trackers daily. I would like to see any revenue earned distributed according to holding of the token it was earned for. Obviously any SMT would have the majority held by the creators so they would get the largest share of the income but it would incentivise people to use the apps and gain the tokens if they were going to get a dividend from them.
This especially applies to steem itself and would cover a lot of the costs if we all got payed a 1:1 token for our sp with all revenues generated. With NED and STEEM inc being the largest token holders they would earn enough to keep running once we have enough users to attract revenue.
I hope that we are not going to get ads that are financing Steemit.inc This going to lead to more centralization, dependency on Steemit.inc and also like you said unfair if they get the major peace of the revenues.
A decentralized network like Steem needs a decentralized approach in regards to advertisement. I think @dclick is trying to accomplish that. Steemit.inc should do fundraising, create payed services and get more effective and productive. They are a company and should act like one and not be de[endent on the reward pool of the Steemblockchain.
This is really the only coherent way of financing STEEM in a decentralized fashion.
I was saying this is 2016 but got shot down hard be an army of 'anti ad' steem agents. The use cases was obvious then. What gives incentives to Investors to power up? Sure use of the currency but you have to have more users joining than leaving for that network effect to happen. Steem should allow Crypto focused banner ads. T
Thanks for bringing this very important topic up for discussion.
But who would buy ads on steem? there are no viewers. We need steem to have an easier sign up process, and more efforts to incentivise new users to stay (i'm pretty sure only ~50 of my 800 followers come on more than once a month). People get frustrated cause there is no point in using the platform, might as well just use Instagram, at least your friends are on there.
Definitely if voting bots are going to be a thing it makes sense that it is an inhouse thing that supports the entire ecosystem rather than line the pockets of whales who run a vote bot.
Steems problem isn't just one of economics, it's one of governance and cooperation. The problem is that steem is a publishing platform with no form of unity, no good way to communicate. The governance is connected only to money and plutocracy rather than work invested. This will always result in uprising and/or abandonment.
The reason that reddit became popular is because it was designed for masses of people. Maybe steem can never work that way, but it needs to get organized one way or another cause pretty soon something else will come along which has these problems figured out.
Look at projects like Aragon and District0x or DAOstack. They are very researched and have mechanisms designed to prevent some of the problems which steems has. As these come out of beta, and other solutions on EOS or what ever platform, steem will become less and less relevant.
We have to do something now to save steem, but are the little dolphins and minnows going to save steem for the whales to just rape them later?
NO ADS!
please...
this this this!!!
I've been saying that forever, too... fix the effin PROMOTE function to incentivize burning tokens for actual visibility and not for ROI...
but please... #noAds... that's up to whichever frontend we use to browse this blockchain, though... if they want to display ads, sure, go ahead, I'll be reading posts from somewhere else then
Would you pay a fee to an app for an ad-free experience?
absolutely not... if worst comes to worst I'd run condenser locally.
I mean, it really depends on the extend of ads a site would display and the quality of the frontend they offer, but in the age of ad-blockers, I think it's questionable if ads would bring in any significant dollars anyways.