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