It is not news that promoted feature on Steemit doesn't work as it was intended to work. The way it currently works is people send SBD to @null with their post link in the memo. Their post will appear under promoted and ranked based on the amount of SBD they have sent. That money gets burnt and decreases the supply of SBD.

The problem is this feature is not used by many and not used often enough. The main reason for that is promoted posts don't really get promoted and people rarely visit promoted section. There is simply no incentive to promote or to consume promoted content.

@liberosist recently wrote a post with a couple of interesting suggestions to improve the promotion system. I absolutely agree with him when he says:

Currently, the promoted posts are stuck in the 'promoted', an isolated section few visit. Most people spend their time in their preferred tags.

Two suggestions he gives to solve the issue are:

1. The promotion value boosts posts up the Trending pages.
2. Promote with Steem.

I don't agree with the first suggestions. In my opinion, adding some of the promoted posts to either sitewide or category based trending would be like forcing the promoted content for consumption. I think promoted content should be consumed voluntarily.

The second suggestion is brilliant. People should be able to promote with either Steem or SBD, whichever they think benefits them most. That way both Steem and SBD can be burnt.

A few weeks ago, @blocktrades posted a proposition for a blockchain-level change regarding the distribution of author/curator rewards and "30-minute rule". This proposal attracted a lot of attention. Three days ago @steemitblog announced that "30-minute rule" will be decreased to 15 minutes with the upcoming hardfork 20. During that discussion, I brought up an idea of incentivizing authors and curators to use the promoted feature more.

Being inspired by these two posts and authors, I would like to elaborate more on my suggestions to improve promoted feature and make it work for everybody.

@ned had this idea/solution a long time ago. He expressed that during an interview at Steemfest 2016. You can watch the video here.

He says the following at 1:09 minutes into the video:

For the first time you can bootstrap a currency now with Steem around people's attention. So people are paying their attention to the website, to steemit.com or to another website based on Steem. And then those people can say to people who want their attention: advertisers or people who want to promote posts - "You can only get your content into my feed if you pay me".

What do I propose?

I propose to incentivizing the use of the promote feature for both content creators and content consumers. This can be achieved by splitting the Steem/SBD sent to @null into two. One portion gets added towards the curation rewards for that particular post, second portion gest burnt. Initially, this can be set as 50/50 split.

For example, I have a post that has a pending payout of 10 SBD. Approximately 7.5 as authors reward, and 2.5 as curators reward. Now I send 10 SBD to @null, 5 SBD will be burned and the other 5 SBD will be added to the curation reward pool increasing it to 7.5.

This will incentivize people to visit the promoted section more often, pay attention to promoted posts, and follow authors who promote their posts. This will also increase the use of the promoted feature by authors and advertisers. More and more authors will use the feature as they see the results of the promotion. It is even possible that people will compete with the frequency and amounts they use the feature with.

The percentage of the split can be adjusted as need and can become an economic instrument to make adjustments to inflation, supply and demand, etc. For example, it can start off as 30 burn / 70 curation pool, and gradually change to 70 burn / 30 curation pool. Obviously, it would need discussions and consensus among witnesses as to what would be best for Steem economy.

Ability to use both Steem or SBD to promote as @liberosist suggested is absolutely necessary.

Who will this proposal benefit?

Short answer, everybody.

1. Authors will use this feature more often now because they know people are incentivized to pay attention to promoted posts. They are paying for attention. Once they get the attention, it is the quality of the content what will drive the upvotes and possibly push their posts to trending. Promoted will not guarantee upvotes. Often times what quality content creators seek is attention.

2. Curators will be visiting promoted feature more often. This is a great opportunity for lower stake/sp holders to increase their curation rewards. At the same time, higher stake/sp holders wouldn't mind higher curation rewards either. Once content consumers start paying attention to promoted section, they will more likely be upvoting quality content they see there. Why wouldn't they? Most importantly though, all of this is done voluntarily. People are not forced to consume promoted posts and ads. They do so by their own choice.

3. Mega-whales/whale/orcas/dolphins will see their investments increase in value. Since more people are burning both Steem and SBD, supply goes down, and when supply goes down prices go up. That simple.

4. Advertisers. Now that there is a working system for advertising, as Steem grows this may attract more companies to buy into Steem. One thing to note is these advertisers will be cool advertisers and will be welcome, because they will be advertising in a non-intrusive manner. This I think can become an innovative approach to advertising online in general. I refer you back to what Ned said last year. "You can only get your content into my feed if you pay me".

5. Developers. Developers of other Steem based apps can develop their own ways of features to promote. Doing so, they can take a percentage of the money used for promotion. Currently, they take various percentages from authors' rewards to fund their projects/operations. If a portion of the money paid by promoters and advertisers on their apps goes to developers they will not need to cut into the author rewards. At the very least the can decrease the percentages they take. Which in return may drastically increase their user base.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Everybody!!!