Crude idea: An advertisement model where front ends, content creators and voters benefit.
Through words from Steem inc. it's slowly dawning on me that the Steem blockchain was never intended in the first place as a content creation platform. It was build to distribute a currency.
Steemit.com was the first App to show how a distribution of a currency could be done. But it somehow became the norm.
Recently @andrarchy wrote this:
It may seem obvious to some, but the challenge is that as the people who architected the protocol, we feel we have a lot of insights into the amazing types of applications that people can build with it. I think that's demonstrated by the fact that when we do build interfaces for it, they seem to strongly influence the interfaces that other people develop afterward.
As far as I know they only build Steemit.com so I'm assuming he means Steemit.com.
We now have tons of apps that can create content in different forms but ultimately they are very close to Steemit.com.
(I guess, Steem inc. saw this too and from there the idea for Smart Media Tokens was born. Every app their own token.)
It was only after Steem Monsters launched their idea that we saw that the Steem blockchain can be used in other, more profitable ways (selling a product (cards), with digital ownership and a cool game).
There still must be a lot of things we have not thought about but are out there for us to build.
Steemit.com has done a fairly ok job at distributing the currency.
STEEM is now in more hands than ever and at current prices I guess anyone can get some (if they still dare).
But it's also becoming clear that everyone competing for the content creation slot on the Steem Blockchain is competing with everyone.
Most of these apps rely on the reward pool for revenue and well, with more apps appearing and a fixed reward pool and a price going down this is going to run pretty thin.
I have been thinking a lot about how to make content creations apps profitable.
It's not easy. But relying on the reward pool so much must end. As recent events has shown, it's not sustainable when price goes down too much.
(And it also makes no sense. Nobody in the real world relies on the new money printing (reward pool) of the FED or ECB for their income. You go after the money that is already out there.)
Today I want to share a crude idea I had. And I'm hoping in the future more people share their ideas cause ultimately we are all in the same boat benefiting from value entering the blockchain.
Could an advertisement model work where the revenue generate from advertisement not only helps the front end but flows back to the content creator and also to the voters?
There are a lot of if's and but's to this idea but I already learned it's a lot better to share ideas with the community and get feedback than go at it alone.
Example:
Let's say Steempeak would introduce advertisement on their site.
Nobody likes advertisements so one would expect users not to use Steempeak but steemit.com instead for an add free experience.
But what if we could create a monetary incentive to use Steempeak because of the advertisements? Could this attract users instead of pushing them away?
The big plus with advertisement is that it can generate revenue from outside the reward pool (payment can still be with STEEM but it must be bought first).
This revenue can be used to pay for costs but also to reward the most popular content creators and their up-voters for bringing in this revenue by buying STEEM from the market with part of the revenue and distribute it back to these two groups.
If's and but's
For this to work it must be possible to somehow track which content creators bring in the most 'eyes' on the advertisements. I'm not sure if this can be done.
If it can then, I'm assuming this will ultimately be the most popular content creators and not always the content that's trending.
It also gives an incentive to upvote the content that is the created by the most popular content creators because you benefit from this advertisement revenue kickback program.
For all this to work it must be possible to somehow track the advertisement revenue potential per user and reward them and their voters accordingly.
Other questions that come up:
Is it possible to see if a user uses an add blocker?
Is it possible to track through which frontend content was consumed and through which frontend an upvote was cast.
Other benefits I can see with a model like this.
When popular content creators come over from youtube for instance we have seen that most of them leave after a while. There is not enough for them to earn here to make it worth it. But if they can bring in a lot of eyes on the advertisement and get a kickback, that could be worth it to stay and post more.
And another benefit. Users that want to consume the content but not benefit from the advertisement kickback can consume the content on Steemit.com without adds.
There is probably a hundred things I'm missing, and maybe someone already worked all this out in the past. I don't know.
All I know is that it's probably time and smart for all apps and all users to start thinking about generating revenue outside of the reward pool for sustainability of the blockchain.
Any feedback is appreciated.
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Everything's on the table :)
I'd like to see a front end run ads inside posts.
Each topic only has one ad per day, by auction.
Each reader only sees this ad once, on the first post they read on that topic.
The author of that post gets a share of the ad revenue.
Logged in users can click a 'Good to know' button next to the ad.
Advertiser gets a refund based on the percentage of logged in users who click the button.
This refund could be account based, or reputation, stake, UA, or a mixture.
People won't mind seeing these ads, because if the ad's annoying they get to scroll past the 'Good to know' button, knowing the advertiser has paid a high rate per impression. (by winning an auction against less abrasive advertisers, who bid more speculating a high refund rate.) and that the author is going to benefit.
Say Steemmonsters runs a campaign just to let us know about steemmonsters; on the #gaming tag.
They'd probably get 20-30% refunded. We already know about SM. You can pay for that, guys.
But what if they ran an ad letting us know that they've signed off on $50K worth of ads on CMC, and several other large crypto sites, to start on Valentine's Day?
Good info, right? They'll probably get 50-70% refunded on that, and will bid accordingly.
Puts the onus on the advertiser to pack in as much useful information as they can.
If they're wrong and overestimate sentiment, then the condenser and authors win.
Man, you really thought this through! It will take me some time to process (I had to read the comment 6 times before I understand it completely). Getting money back for creating useful advertisement. wow!
Thanks. It wouldn't need to write to the chain; the condenser could pay the author in transferable credits, which they could save up to run their own campaign, or sell.
That said it could also make a nice use case for an SMT.
That's the thing though...there's a built-in monetary incentive which is that we are all owners of this platform, so we all benefit from any money that comes into it. Even we don't directly get more STEEM in our accounts, the value of the STEEM we have goes up. Even if all the ad money went to steampeak directly in USD, that means they don't have to sell STEEM to pay for expenses and have more funds available to build a better product. Any way that money comes into the Steem ecosystem is good for every STEEM holder.
If properly messaged, users should not be pushed away from ads on Steem, but attracted to them and supportive of them. I look at it like the recent Netcoins contest. People don't generally want to put their email addresses into random websites and go visit it every 24 hours, but the whole community rallied around it because it's great for Steem. Advertisements are no different.
If steempeak or any other site started selling ads, I would campaign to get everyone on Steem to go use those sites, actually spend time looking at the ads and if there's any products being advertised that they are interested in that they go and buy it. I would offer contests with prizes for people who showed they bought something through a Steem advertisement, again just like with Netcoins.
Now imagine you're an advertiser...you're used to advertising on sites where people hate your ads and do whatever they can to block them, and then you find Steem where everyone LOVES your ads and goes out of their way to see them and buy your products.
All we have to do is have one site or group get over the hump of getting that first serious advertiser, and running a campaign like the Netcoins one, and I think it takes off from there.
Yes 100%! For the STEEM token to gain real value, revenue needs to come into the blockchain. Not leave it constantly by selling STEEM.
I will sure support it.
Dear @exyle
You have lots of great ideas but is there anyone from Steemit Inc who listens you? I want to know that...
If advertisement model is considered, The traffic of site will be important. All Steemitans can try to make SEO for their posts. So The traffic of Steemit from Google can increase. That can make Steemit bigger.
Steemit try to be equivalent to Reddit, Instagram, Faceebok. All of them have advertisements on their apps, websites. What do we have?
But I want know, Is there anyone who listens you from Steemit Inc?
Wouldn’t running ads inside of the post give us an idea of which users are pushing the ads? Also, there could be features like Basic Attention Token with the Brave browser. Have ads off by default and users earn tokens for allowing ads to be placed in their content. Or users can pay to turn ads off using Steem paid to Steemit inc. etc. Just some ideas.
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Thanks, great ideas!
You have a great idea.
I think this advertising should be intelligent. If I am reading a post with an art tag, I should see an ad related to online art stores and merchants. If the ad can be tightly integrated to the content, it won’t be annoying.
I think Steemians should be able to opt out of all ads for a fee that they pay to Steem. This allows a balance in the costs to run the platform and gives a path back to how Steemit looks now.
Google took this path and they did well.
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Those 2 twin brothers once said they earn more here than on youtube at least it was like that for a while.
The Steem price was way differnt though.
Even running masternodes, which was money printing for a while is going down. Which on the other hand brings it back up for the people still running their nodes as they get more rewards.
The downward spiral Steem is in...how intersting can advertising really be? How many clicks does a popular dtube video get?
I don't know for sure if the answer lies in advertisement. I'm trying to think in solutions to the problem this low STEEM price has caused. These 2 twin brothers could have brought with them an enormous amount of eyes on advertisement if such a system was in place. The price of STEEM simply matters less.
What do you think about @dclick? It is already working a bit into this space.
I agree. But still believe there must be better ways than advertisements, tracking users from where they came...well..facebook has a lot of problems as we speak with this privacy related issue. Only the thought of it makes me shiver. Track for adblockers is possible and people now receive warnings on those sites that they should disable adblocker to see the content. I always move on without trying to see the content of that web site.
So, if the problem is generating revenue, and it is as we know, not every firm or website depends on advertising. Perhaps it is worthfull looking into investments from other companys or entrepreneurs. Also the business of Steeminc should not become a advertisement business.
And if eventually is unescapable to use advertisements, I opt for a subscription model. I am willing to pay a fee to not see any of those pesky advertisement rubbish.
Better ways for content creation apps to generate revenue than advertisements, I am all for it! Please share you idea's. A subscription model sure can work, it's not uncommon.
We already know that people are willing to pay for a good products on the blockchain. Steem Monsters has proven this without a doubt.
STEEM is a currency that can connect a lot people all over the world with ease. I'm trying to see it in a new light.
what would that fee be? how many users would be able to pay it? example if it would be 10$ in your country that is maybe a hour work, in mine it is a day, in some it may be half of the month. in this market in a month of posts i earned in liquid steem around 15$. so you have to think how many users would you lost by subscription model.
Ads placed by tags could be good, so you don't have a lot of user tracking data. now will companies would like that i am not sure.
Advertisement would be a way to keep it free. Subscription is for the ones that don't want to see adds or if an app is so good people don't mind paying for it. There are so many frontends and apps to access the blockchain nowadays I don't see why any of this would lose users? Users of the blockchain or user of the apps?
that would be great, if you don't want to see ads you have an option to subscribe. i was thinking if you go only subs access that would lose users.
I don't mind ads if they are done right, not in you face.
@exyle the problem of everyone wanting to use the reward pool to fund their little projects is a real issue. To much of the reward pool is needed to fund these apps and as you said it ends up spreading the pool to thin. Even at $3 steem it's still an issue as the developers need fiat to pay the bills and will create constant downward pressure on Steem. With this in mind I started trying to come up with a solution.
I am in the process of working on something that will not pull from the rewards pool in the least, but instead add value to the blockchain by bringing in outside fiat on what I imagine will be a daily basis. All bills will be paid from our fiat revenue and no need for steem for funding. This will be a real live company that will also lives outside of steemit, but use Steem as a payment option for those who want to earn Steem. The other option will be our own coin, but as that coin will be treated 100% as a stable coin I'm guessing that many people will opt for Steem for the upside potential. These coins will need to be purchased by the company to then pay those who earn them.
A key point is this will live outside of steem and attract new people to Steem. People who never before owned steem will be exposed to free lighting fast transactions. This should help bring in new users to Steemit and more important for value new holders of Steem.
Not going into to much detail on purpose, but giving enough to hopefully let you know there are things in the works that can potentially be game changers for Steem and it's purely about Steem being a currency without worrying about the reward pool in the least.
Yes we will have a steemit account, but that will be more about posting promotions and other important information and not used to be the reward source.
Sounds intriguing! Hit me up when you can share more and maybe I can talk about it in a vlog if you want.
For sure once it's closer to launch I'd love some promotion. This will be at least end of 1st quarter thing as it's a lot of programming that is needed, but more likely a early 2nd quarter of 2019. In the mean time I will keep you up to date as we are letting people know more about what we are doing if you would like.
You on discord? If so same name?
These are some great ideas and thoughts. The one problem I see is even if you get rewarded back from the advertisement by buying Steem there is still a limited amount of Steem that is going to be available. Eventually that is going to run out. There would need to be a model where that is an option, but not the default. As much as I hate to say it maybe use BTC or LTC as the standard. Something where there is a large supply out there. Just a thought...
If STEEM is going to run out by then the price would have gone up and you will get less resembling the same amount of USD.
I'm totally non techy - but how about making space for advertisers, and users, to come together, and let the advertiser/user come to some agreement about inserting their in the user post header (or something.)
You get the idea...?
edit - but we need growing user base first, to make it a attractive proposition....