The problem of content creation has been with us since the dawn of internet and even before that. There are tremendous amounts of free content being created every day. And they are in fact so valuable, that the biggest players in our global economy are the huge platforms displaying this content - Facebook & Instagram, Google with Youtube, TripAdvisor, Snapchat,... I think you get the point. Content creators fueling these platforms, with a small exception of Youtube's superstar influencers, are not being appreciated for their contributions. Content fueling the revenues of such platforms is not being monetized by the creators.

Steemit solves it

Enters Steemit. A platform where you get an actual meaningful, interchangeable reward for sharing your content. Steemit is currently the top player solving the problem of free online content creation. And at this point, I'd like to take a bow to Steem and to you - the awesome community behind Steemit. With Steemit, the world of Internet made an important step towards fully democratizing online content monetization.

But blog posts are just a piece of the puzzle

But we're still not quite there yet. Steem is doing a fine job with Steemit, but the Internet is full of content that is just not suitable to be presented in a blog format which Steemit offers. Let's take reviews for an example. And for me to be able to paint you a better picture, let's talk about travel reviews - first-hand information about places you want to visit in the future.

Reviews by their nature need a special kind of presentation. First of all, for consumers of such content (e.g. travellers), it's convenient to have reviews of a specific place in one place, not scattered around a platform or even multiple platforms. Consumers need to be able to quickly access reviews of similar places. Reviews need numerical ratings for consumers to be able to quickly filter out the bad places. So reviews, by their nature, need a special kind of platform to be displayed on.

Enters Futourist

In order to solve the next piece of the content creation puzzle, me and the rest of our dedicated team are creating Futourist - the first blockhain-based travel review platform. It's a platform where you get paid to review the places you visit. Just like Steemit, it's a platform that rewards you with crypto tokens for creating content. The long-term goal of Futourist is to create a place where a future tourist will make his decisions.

Futourist will be a travel review platform, focusing on video reviews and catering the creators. Read more about the Futourist project on futourist.io.

Catering the creators

I don't think there is much explanation needed on Steemit, when I say you will be rewarded for your content on Futourist thorugh crypto tokens. It's the basic way of catering the content creators and the concept made Steemit what it is today. But it doesn't end with crypto rewards.

Platforms wanting to bring content creators on board must implement an internal social network of some kind. Content creators must have an option to grow their community, they must have some sort of a "Follow" button on their channel and they must have a space of their own on the platform, where their community can thrive. Steemit does a good job here, but this is where the big review industry players fail.

How you ever checked someones profile on TripAdvisor? Maybe, but most of the people didn't. It's because TripAdvisor doesn't enable the committed content creators to create their own audience. For a quality in-depth review I still go to Youtube and potentially Steemit, even though reviews don't fit perfectly here. It's just that these platforms offer tools the content creators need.

Video reviews

Online videos, as old as the technology is, is still not supported by the largest players in the travel review industry. In 2018, video is a clear winner of social content types. Lately even textual content posted by media sites is being displayed in short Facebook videos that you need to read. The speed and convenience of consuming video content is just so much greater than with other types of content, that it cannot be ignored by anyone these days. Let alone the huge corporations running the travel review industry.

Join the cause, contribute to our crowdsale

I'm going to end this article with an honest invitation to you, my dear Steemit reader. If you do care about the future of fairness in content creation, do enter 15th of February into you calendars. It's when Futourist starts its token crowdsale.

We'll be selling off 25% of the future Futurist's economy (25% of total token supply), with the investment hardcap set at only 4,000,000€. Since we have a very good starting point in our existing service review platform called OpenHours, the funds raised will be enough for us to develop and market Futourist.

We shaped our FTR token to have a long list of utilities. FTR is currently an ERC20 standard token, but we are considering using Smart Media Tokens by Steem for a part of our solution as soon as it's launched. Too bad it's not out yet.

The team behind the project comes from various industries, from web & app development, to branding and marketing. It is supported by the knowhow of experienced advisors, coming from ICONOMI and other successful blockchain projects.

Visit our ICO page and read our whitepaper to get more info. Oh, and we do have crowdsale awarness Competitions (bounties) running right now, so you're welcome to collect a large amount of FTR tokens by being one of our early supporters and contributors.

For any questions I'm here for you. You can also message me on Telegram (@gorazdrajar) or join Futourist's public Telegram group. And guys, keep Steemit alive, it's precious. Talk to you soon.