Well it seems like a lot of people are brainstorming solutions for Steemit's financial woes. One of the main suggestions going around is introducing advertising. This post is primarily a reaction to @exyle's post. Follow the link to check it out.

So I think that in order to really start to unwrap this issue we first need to think about what the ABSOLUTE goal is here that would solve all these issues.

More people, more people powered up, more eyeballs.

I think we can maybe all agree that that's the ultimate goal right? So will the actions that we take today bring us closer to, or farther away from that goal? I think that implementing a half baked ad model now would definitely take us farther from that goal. Why does it necessarily have to be half baked? Because the reason that Facebook and Google(also youtube) have created all that value is because they are the best at providing you RELEVANT ads and this is not at all an easy thing to do. They've spent billions making this as top notch as possible, and oh by the way, everyone STILL hates it.

The only sort of ads we could probably use in the short term, and correct me if I'm wrong are "dumb" ads. Ads that are in no way directly correlated to the people's interests here. The other aspect is that these ads earn Steemit money by people clicking on them(primarily, you can also get paid for impressions, but I doubt we have enough traffic to make this a large revenue stream), in this community I don't feel that this would generate enough revenue to offset the blow to the user experience which is already probably the weakest point of this ecosystem.

Also, we already have an unintentional ad platform here that everyone hates and avoids, it's called the trending page, and it's basically free. You might even turn a profit.

The other thing that would make this platform attractive to advertisers is eyeballs. So what are our DAU's like? (daily active users) Let's check out @penguinpablo's awesome stats.

I think accounts transacting is probably the best metric for what's going on. This includes a vote, a post, a comment or a transfer. The average is about 50k. I post everyday and probably vote more than 10x per day. Many others do more, or less. We can only speculate as to how many people that ends up being actually looking at content here, but basically, these are not impressive numbers. There are plenty of not famous, streamers, bloggers, youtubers, that have much more traffic than this, and they're all still competing for those ad dollars.

The average amount of comments on these posts is 2-3 comments. ie Our engagement numbers are also not impressive on paper.

My fear is that introducing ads at this point will actually have the opposite effect that people want and drive the sorts of users we have here away.

What type of users are here?

Hardcore. Steemit is not really a casual platform. In its current state the people that are doing the most and are successful are what I would define as "Hardcore" users.

• _{For some context, a large chunk of my professional background has been working on social and mobile games that are free to play. Ads are something I've dealt with. Depending on the application I think they can be a great option, I just don't think they are for Steemit.}

Anyway hardcore users are usually extremely dedicated and willing to go to great lengths to support a project. Once the original developers turn their backs on the experience of those hardcore users, I've never seen this turn out good. Youtube is huge. Everyone in the world is on it. There are hardcore people and casuals, but mostly casual people. People that watch youtube videos, and maybe post one themselves every now and then. Ads are great for youtube. I think some other solutions might be a better fit for Steem and Steemit.

Solutions

• Steemit taking a beneficiary reward from all users. @exyle mentioned in the comments of his post that the issue with this was that it still depends on the price of Steem, which means it will be variable with the markets. This is true, but Steem is still far from worthless and if Steemit took 5-10% of all post rewards that would make a HUGE difference in their bottom line. This basically serves to decentralize the cost of the blockchain. Why should it all be on Steemit's shoulders to support everyone else. This will also at the very least not make the user experience worse, and I think it's something that could be done in a relatively short amount of time. I think building a proper ad platform as well as attracting advertisers is a lot of work and a big feature. We should be taking things off Steemit's plate, not adding more on.

• Charging frontends to use Steemit's full nodes. This is obviously extremely valuable and if something is valuable, it probably shouldn't be free.

• Requiring that app developers have their own private nodes? Not sure about the feasibility of this, but maybe giving them a lot of time to make the necessary preparations beforehand.

• Community led initiatives. Basically I think we need to take steps at creating organizational structures within the community to address the issues we CAN address for example:

Marketing - Creating ads for Steem. @sndbox has already demonstrated the power of this at a smaller scale with their contests and bounties. We need an incentive structure and I think a problem to solve to scale this would be decentralizing the funding of the incentives.

Onboarding - Again creating a community led referral program that offers incentives for successfully onboarding new users with different levels of incentives.(ex. tier 3 = you onboarded a new user, tier 2 = you onboarded a new user that has demonstrated a certain level of activity. tier 1 = you onboarded a user that has powered up Steem.) The problem to solve here is fighting abuse and tracking data maybe, but these are probably things community developers could help with as we'd just need to get information from the blockchain that we could use in our own way.

These are just a few examples and I think if we can find a way to put our collective brain power together we could come up with more that WE can do without relying on Steemit. What do you all think? Do you think ads would be good for Steemit? Any other ideas at how we can help with our current crisis?