The github for Nitrous is now live: https://github.com/eonwarped/nitrous. It's fully open source. You can track the changes we're making and see how we're turning condenser into a more revenue friendly tool. We started closed, but it didn't long to decide to open source it. As I mentioned before you can go from closed to open, but going back closed is impossible once the genie is out of the bottle. So, we just took a few days to make sure it was the right call for us.

Now that we are open source it means that if you want to see Nitrous do more things you can help!

Critical Priority

Getting revenue in the door as soon as possible for users of Nitrous is our highest priority. Steemit.com is integrating freestar (I think it's freestar.com) services into their site. Adwords and other options exist to generate revenue. We're going to work on this ourselves, but if anyone that's part of the open source movement wants to help us that would be great.

Short term figuring out how to easily allow custom instances of Nitrous to incorporate adsense or similar ads would be very helpful! More broadly though...

Problem Statement

The challenge for the steem ecosystem is finding advertisers, and it's especially hard when sites are new. If we go with some of the traditional advertising it'll make money in the short run, but in the long run utilizing other people's ad systems will always net less money than if we run our own. Furthermore, the adwords stuff will likely generate less revenue than a crypto based system. It'll also likely do things like pay in fiat, which isn't always convenient. In short we need our own ad revenue system that can tie all Nitrous instances together.

Vision Statement

In my vision for Steem Engine and Nitrous there's a central place that advertisers can purchase ads and site operators can sell ads. There's a market for it. There's a top banner, side banners, and bottom banners (feed is through promotion in the site rather than banner ads) which can be traded.

The closest thing I can think of is Nicehash. An advertiser puts up a bid for 1 cent per click for 1000 clicks, and if they are the highest bidder their advertisement will run. They put money into a contract or account to start the ads and the money is transferred as the ads run. If a different advertiser comes along and is willing to pay 1 eng per click for 1000 clicks then sites would switch over to showing those banner ads until they run out money, and then revert back to 2 eng per for 1000 click ads.

Steem-Engine would take a small cut (3-5% initially and trend down over time as volume increased) of the action for facilitating the trade and expanding the use cases and tooling.

Now with this system functioning people with sites that generate traffic will get money which should in theory offset what they have to pay to run the site!

Market cap

The second way sites make money is doing "programmatic selling" like steemit inc does. Hopefully these nitrous sites have much smaller costs than Steemit Inc does so the programmatic selling can be much smaller.

Steem has 1M accounts and 50k active users. It has a market cap of 110M. How much do you think a community with 5k active accounts will be worth? Do you think you can make a community with 500 or 5000 people? Does that seem attainable?

If steem-engine.com charges for scotbot or Nitrous do you think you can use ad revenue that will come along soon or selling tokens to settle the cost?