Advertising on Steemit: a potential game-changer or certain doom?
As Steemit grows more and more popular, many people are going to start figuring out ways to maximize their profit on this platform. No doubt businesses and corporations are going to try to do the same once they begin to realize the rapidly growing size of the user base and how actively involved the community is in almost every aspect of the network. In many ways, it's a perfect target market with a broad demographic, and one that is bound to increase dramatically over the coming months and years. No doubt even as I'm writing this, there are social media marketing managers positively frothing at the prospect of getting into the Steem advertising market early.
Pictured: frothing
Of course, at the moment the only way to make money from Steemit, as we all know, is by posting and curating. But, as with other social media networks, new possibilities for profit-generation will open up as Steemit develops. Marketers will soon come knocking on the door of the Steemit development team with shiny teeth and enticing proposals for marketing campaigns (if they haven't already). The important questions to ask when this happens are:
1) how will they work?
and 2) will they ultimately be good for the network?
Pictured: said marketers
As for Question 1, the simplest advertising method is to use the Steemit system as it currently exists, employing good marketing strategy, copywriting, and even bots to create and curate posts in such a way that their posted ads gather a lot of upvotes, and therefore high visibility, while also generating revenue on the post itself. This seems like an attractive prospect for marketers, as it's essentially the method individual Steemers are using to market themselves as content-creators. Banner ads might also be a possibility, and would be fairly easy to implement on Steemit, as on any webpage.
If we look at Facebook's advertising system, we can see a number of ways this might translate to Steemit. Businesses and pages of all kinds have the ability to promote themselves easily within the Facebook system, appearing as suggested pages or posts that pop up either to the side of your newsfeed or in the actual feed itself. Steemit ads could work either of these ways, with advertisers paying a fee to have their links, or even their own Steemit posts, featured in a highly visible position (such as near the top of the trending page).
Pictured: a plucky young ad man on his way to the top
These are just some of the forms Steemit advertising might take. As for Question 2, there are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, inviting advertising to Steemit could do a lot for the platform's own revenue, allowing the developers to accelerate its rollout and develop many new improvements to the system at a much higher rate. Particularly if ads are paid for and paid out in Steem Dollars (an interesting prospect indeed), this investment by big business could also have a positive impact on the value of all Steem currency, further benefitting the network.
However, there is a downside to all of this, and this is why I personally lean towards not allowing conventional advertising in the Steemit system. Paradoxically, I can't help but feel that seeing Steemit littered with ads would cheapen its collective vision as a decentralized, open platform free from commercial interest outside of its own internal revenue system. Allowing big business to control a stake in Steemit as freely as this opens a door which, once opened, will be all but impossible to close. Frankly, having to scroll past advertising when what I really want to read is independent thought would make me less inclined to use the network as much. Eventually we might even find it hard to differentiate between popular posts that are created by normal users and those that have paid for added visibility as a form of advertising, which would all but defeat the principle of the network. Of course, the lure of money has the potential to win over even the most well-intentioned (and I believe the developers of Steemit do have its best interests at heart), but we as users of the network also need to make our opinions heard now, while the network is still in its relative infancy.
What's your opinion? Should Steemit allow advertising in the future? If so, how should it be regulated? If not, why not? Let's create a discussion that will hopefully inform the decisions that @dan, @ned, and the rest of the Steemit team will need to make in the not-too-distant future.
PS: If you're interested in the topic, I came up with what I think is a pretty decent idea for artists/businesses/entrepreneurs to get more out of Steemit without the need for paid advertising - feel free to check it out here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@generalspecific/steem-engines-how-steemit-could-become-a-useful-and-profitable-platform-for-artists-and-businesses-not-just-individuals
Also see my thoughts on the regulation of NSFW content here if you like: https://steemit.com/steemit/@generalspecific/should-we-allow-nsfw-content-on-steemit-the-case-for-censorship-vs-freedom-of-posting
Truthfully, we're so inundated with advertising everywhere else on the internet this has felt like a safe haven for information in a clean space and that is one of the largest reasons I love this platform.
But, if advertising rears its ugly head in the future it won't send me away from Steemit....I guess I'll just have to ignore it like I do on every other site. This would make me sad for real.
I strongly agree as an advertising student
Me too, man! Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
I AGREE. Advertising should never be allowed, and there is but one possible exception: IF the advertising can only link to another steemit members post! And only if it is paid for with steem and benefits steemit users. If ads are added, it must be done VERY carefully, or not at all!
A PERFECT example of how ads might can work, complete with unobtrusive placement, is shown on my post here: QUESTION: should steemit let us steemers advertise using steem? Be sure to tell everyone you know to come vote here at: https://steemit.com/steemit/@kingtylervvs/if-steemit-ever-does-decide-to-advertise-there-is-only-1-way-it-could-work-in-my-opinion-debate
This is a democratic community decision.
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Upvote the #steemengine for in house steemit poster ads!
Having ads banners opens the door to malware and annoying popups or loud flash based animations.
I would rather have sponsored posts, as long as they are non intrusive, marked as such, and tagged properly.
In the long run, I believe that some type of advertising is inevitable, I just hope it is done correctly in the spirit of Steemit.
Yeah, I think keeping things well-intentioned is the right way to go. Proper tagging is definitely going to be important so that we at least know what kind of content we're looking at.
Community controls with ai assit moderation & malware protection could weed out 84% of the crap.
I'm all for it, as long as we have the option to block the ads and/or tailor our feeds to show only the kinds of ads we'd be interested in seeing. Personally, I don't mind seeing ads once in a while, as long as they're non-intrusive and for things I might actually spend money on.
The important thing is, however, is to not let said advertisers 'cookie' their way into our other online activities. The beauty of Steemit is that we are not giving away our info. We certainly would want to keep it that way.
Agreed - this is a very important point!
Many people do not realize that even mainstream stories are already written by bots in cases where there are relatively easy rules to follow. These include sports scores and stocks to name a few. I agree that as technology improves, the line will get blurred even more. I could foresee an ad being embedded in an image tag pretty easily.
Steem power holders suffer a 10% inflation when adoption slows down. They need to offset this loss somehow or they will loose money. They will do this by creating great content to get revenue from upvotes. But for a large portion of SP holders this will not be possible so they will start selling their upvotes for money. Probably posts that contain some kind of advertising. There is nothing that can stop that development. Ads are coming when adoption slows down.
wow this is an logical and very good explanation.
Care to elaborate on this theory? I'd like to know more about how you see the inflation taking place and how you forsee people selling votes for money.
They'll figure it out.. Doesn't take much money to curate something to the front page..
Advertisement won't be something we "won't" allow, ads have become more evolved with time, a lot of things you consider not being ads nowadays might be ads without you knowing it. Even people are becoming part-time ads.
In a decentralized platform its going to be even harder to "shut down" or "not allow" ads, cause there will be fine lines between what is ads and what isn't.
The only thing I hope for now is that we won't add ads to the site (banners, side-ads, etc). I made a post about this 2 months ago: https://steemit.com/steem/@acidyo/ads and thinking about it now, I like it without ads a lot more and I'm sure many users won't even want to be paid in ads and sacrifice the clean feeling to the site. Also statistics like someone wrote earlier today prove that people don't want to see ads more and more (ad-block becoming more used). If they want to see their favorite bloggers, authors, etc use ads in their material, that's another thing.
I think in the future it will be a bit more like Instagram is today where companies and advertisers pay users with a lot of traffic for ads.
I love to think Steemit in its purest variation. Regulating ADS might lead also to a kinda of a niche generating may be ingenious ADS that somehow find their way to fit in Steemit politic but also promote whatever they do. And I'm always in favor of ingenious solutions.
I think the Steemit team earns perfectly and without advertising, we are the best advertising!
Advertisers won't be the only ones with stake. All the whales invested in the platform will be ready to downvote advertisers who don't contribute enough value.
Advertisers will just have to adapt by a) doing the kind of advertising that is actually appreciated and valued by users and b) compensating users monetarily for their attention. It seems like the perfect platform for that as you can find out what users like from their public posting behaviour and sending them a small financial reward in the form of SBD is trivial.