Hi and a tribute to content creation

Hi, my name is Jure and this is in tribute to content creation.

I've mostly been working on content creation in one form or another throughout my life. From journalism, travel blogging, photography, design and the like.

It's rewarding in a way, when you see people reading the work you publish, but and there's a big but, it can be highly discouraging to continue in the current online ecosystem.

While free user generated content is what created the astounding amount of freely available content online today, it is at the same time a big challenge to actually get any sort of return on the invested time that is put in by various creators such as bloggers, social media users and the like.

We have collectively embraced this as a given and of course the vast majority of people do not actually spend a huge amount of time in developing content that is in turn consumed by the masses. Nor to they hope to somehow monetize their contribution.

On the other hand there are many out there that create substantial amount of useful information for us and they mostly do not get anything in return, other than perhaps the satisfaction of being heard or followed.

I personally have for example created pieces of content that highlight important aspects of Qatar's (country in the Middle East) society, which were previously completely unavailable to the public. What did I get in return? Well tens of thousands of visitors and in some cases over a hundred thousand visitors, who read my articles. Some subscribed to my newsletter, some reached out to me.

What about ad money you say? Well, you know Google Ads don't really bring in much cash unless you're churning millions of visitors. And yes I know that's not the only monetization strategy. There of course are ways to earn something for hard work in creating content online, but the entry to that is far more difficult than some make it appear.

I do need to note that I took over a month to write these pieces, as it involved research for data that mostly did not exist in the public sphere at all.

There is some value (non monetary) that I received, but time will tell to what extent.

Long form investigative research and journalism has been in a downward spiral for a long time. Fact is the vast majority of publications will not let a journalist spend a month on a single piece of content. There simply isn't an economic factor behind to justify it.

Further on, most content is censored in one way or the other. Be it by editors, publication owners, governments or as is widely prevalent, by self censorship. The latter happens especially when there are potential laws that can get a journalist/blogger/content creator in legal difficulties ranging from financial penalties to imprisonment.

Only a select few publications around the world devote resources to investigative writting and hence stories remain unwritten, the public access to crucial information about the societies people live in remains restricted, because the content developers simply don't exist. They cant survive on the satisfaction of being heard and their articles read. They need to be paid for their hard work or else, they mostly stop or never start producing in the first place. With this I mean the people that have devoted substantial amounts of their time and energy to it.

What I'm getting at here is that when properly incentivized, content creators can deliver better quality, as they are able to invest more time into their work.

Now I know Steemit is not specifically designed or created for this, nor does it necessarily reward the content creator in relation to time and energy spent for their posts. Heck, a post with 7 pictures of a squirrel getting 500$, kind of sounds wrong in many ways.

Not here to say what's worth more, that's for the platform and the community to decide. But if there's room for squirrels, maybe just maybe some content creators that have continuously put practically all of their time to succeed online, will find a more rewarding platform than in the past. And maybe we'll get to see more of them being financially rewarded for the useful information they bring to us all when using the internet for free.

We'll see what happens to Steemit, but until then here's a toast to this project and its ability to already financially support content creators. Maybe it flops in the end, but hey at least we're giving it a shot.