Is Advertising The End Of Steemit?

Is our beloved Steemit about to die? Has the death knell been sounded, alerting the internet graveyard to open its gates for yet another failed experiment?

The other day the @steemitblog announced that Steemit is preparing to test the use of advertising on the site. To a casual observer this is a rather innocuous statement. We live in the 21st century and advertising is as much a part of our lives as the motor car.

However to the more established denizens of Steemit, when it comes to revenue generating ideas there couldn't have been a worse announcement to make. Especially as the Steemit whitepaper mentions on more than one occasion, that it is a scandalous state of affairs that Facebook, Twitter, et. al., make billions of dollars without sharing it with the people who made it possible.

Shut That Door

There is a saying; shutting the door after the horse has bolted. It basically means that you have acted way after the time to act has passed, and I'm afraid that is what Steemit inc. are doing right now.

Everyone is running around shutting the doors to the stables, however the horses have left a long time ago, and it makes me somewhat angry.

The simple fact is, I like a lot of the guys on the Steemit team and some of the top witnesses as well, however they have really, royally screwed this one up and here's why.

Opportunity Lost

When Steemit was riding high in August of 2016, I, like many others, was very excited at where this new disruptive tech could end up. Steemit was a game changer, instead of being a commodity to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder, we were pioneers, controllers of our own destiny.

At the time I saw many confused and unfocused marketing campaigns springing up everywhere. However these weren't Steemit inc. initiatives, they were user-led marketing drives which really left a lot to be desired.

One such campaign I remember, was the Steemit billboard. I'm struggling to come up with a bigger waste of time, money and space, than a billboard advert for a blogging platform. Yet it was voted up to the tune of around $1,600.

No, that's not a typo, I said sixteen hundred dollars.

I can guarantee you that the billboard did not bring one solitary user to the site. Why would it? You're driving on the highway and you see a billboard for a site you've never heard of. In the two seconds it takes you to drive past, you've already forgotten about it.

Then there were various copycat billboard "campaigns", desperately trying to get rewards similar to the original idea.

I watched and waited, until I could hold my tongue no more.

I made posts, I posted responses to articles, I made as much noise as I could. Over and over again I gave suggestions for how Steemit inc. could utilise the then millions of dollars worth of Steem into an effective marketing campaign.

Not just me either, there were many good suggestions from Steemians about how we could take this platform forwards and grow it to the size it deserves to be.

In the end, I gave up. Nobody was listening, nobody cared, I was told over and over again, that I needed patience because Steemit was in beta-test mode. I'm not one to wallow in negativity for too long so I accepted that HQ-led marketing would never happen.

Why Advertising Won't Work

As I mentioned above, it feels like Steemit inc. are shutting doors that no longer need to be shut, or rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

That sounds harsh, however it is true. Advertising won't work on Steemit in the way it works on Facebook and the other big hitters.

This is because those platforms have user details with Facebook being the absolute leader in information farming. They know your name, age, sex, location, where you went to school, what makes you laugh, cry, love. They know what makes you happy, what makes you sad.

They know what products you like, they know what pages you visit when you leave Facebook. This, is an advertisers dream, because now you can advertise your product to relevant people, something you can't do as accurately in a newspaper or TV ad.

However this is not the case for Steemit, because of course the Whitepaper specifically says, that the Facebook model is lame and unfair...

Maybe though they are just going to put Google adwords adverts onto our posts? Well doesn't that then still put Steemit in the "profiting from its users" club?

Add to those points, that most people use adblocker these days, so a very low amount of them will even be seen, let alone clicked on.

So the choices are try and copy Facebook and fail miserably. Or exploit your existing users content, something that your whitepaper expressly says it will never do.

A Perfect Advertising Model

OK, so as not to just post a downer article about how we're all doomed, I will lay out the way advertising could work on Steemit. Even though experience tells me that my ideas will be completely ignored, I'll still give it a go.

As somebody who has worked in the ad sales industry, and therefore spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of marketing mangers and directors, along with various product managers and even CEOs, I am acutely aware of the expectations of a marketing budget.

To put it simply, advertisers want a return on investment (ROI), in other words, for every dollar, pound, or yen they spend, they expect to make that money back, plus a profit of a predetermined percentage. Simple.

Imagine being able to go to a marketing director and say, not only can I get you an ROI on your budget, I'll get all, some, or even more of that budget back into your bank account!

WHA-????

Yes, by using the Utopian.io model, whereby you create supervised voting bots to vote up anyone creating quality copy about your product.

If Dale's Widgets loads up an ad bot with $100,000 then each one of their votes is going to be pretty chunky. Especially when the price of Steem is a dollar or more.

Imagine the delight of the marketing director, as he realises that not only is he getting loads of user-generated marketing going. He is bypassing the millions of copies of adblocker that stop people ever seeing his advert.

Once the campaign was finished, he'd power down and get back his budget, having sold loads of product and generated a buzz around his widgets.

I pitched this very idea to an advertising person I know, and they were very interested. Their take was that once the user base got to around five million, it was worth taking a little risk to see how it went.

Conclusion

There are a lot of good people working for Steemit whom I like a lot. However I'm extremely frustrated with them, especially @ned who sits at the top of the tree. If it wasn't for @dantheman and @ned I wouldn't be writing this, and we would still be in the same world of lame social media choices. Therefore I will always have time for them, but as anyone who has followed me knows, I am not afraid to speak my mind.

I would hope that they would rethink their advertising strategy, whatever it is, and think about how to create a sustainable system. Because otherwise Steemit will die, and we'll all be sitting here wondering how and why that was allowed to happen.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT STEEMIT ADVERTISING, IS IT A GOOD OR BAD THING? MAYBE YOU FEEL IT WON'T AFFECT USER EXPERIENCE AND WE SHOULD JUST GET ON WITH IT? OR PERHAPS LIKE ME, YOU FEEL IT CAN BE DONE IN BETTER WAYS?

AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Callum Skelton on Unsplash

Cryptogee