Some Thoughts About the New Promoted Posts Feature

I have expressed my concerns about the usability of the new feature for Promotion of Posts on Steemit, you can find them in my comments in the introduction post of the feature. Never the less, even if I did not like the idea too much I still was eager to try it out and see if it actually works in helping new users to promote their good posts and thus make them seen more...

I have started with a few Steem Dollars to check out the feature, apparently lost 2 SBD for a post that was past its first payout period before actually learning that there is a bug thanks to @jesta posting about it and promoting his post on the top of the list. With 1 SBD for a promoted post or even less you guarantee that your post will be essentially buried in the below top 100-200 promoted posts or somewhere down there, so it will not make much point in spending just a little.

To make use of Promoted Content you need to go big in spending, but where do you get so much SBD to actually try and promote your content... remember you are a new user or somebody that has not yet earned much more than few Steem Dollars with your good posts. Well, you have to buy them, if you can afford to buy them in order to help yourself in getting more visible and attracting more readers and maybe, but just maybe also earning at least to cover your cost for the promotion by promoting your post (no guarantees for that). You can easily spend tens or even hundreds of dollars trying to promote yourself and end up with not much as a return... so you might be better off by just continuing to try hard as everybody tells you to. This way you may still be earning just a little reward for your posts, but at least you will not be spending money that you may not be able to afford to lose.

A the moment the Promoted page seems more like a place where the established authors that have earned quite a lot of SBD already and can afford to spend quite a bit just promoting further their work. There is nothing bad in that of course, but they are essentially ruining the features for everyone else that just wants to use it to help in getting more readers / followers that may be interested in the type of topic(s) they are posting about.

Just take a look, the top promoted post at the moment is boosted with $200 SBD, the second one is with $125 SBD, the third one is with $122 SBD... the 20th is boosted with $50 SBD. Also in the top 20 boosted posts most people are with a reputation level of 60 or above (just a few with a bit less). This trend continues for the top 40 boosted posts with the 40th currently boosted with $20 SBD. Going down to 60 posts there are mostly 50 to 60 reputation users there and the 60th post is with just $10 SBD, down to the 80th post and you get $6 SBD boosted, the 100th post is boosted with $4.04 SBD, the 120th post is boosted with $2.27 USD, the 140th post is boosted with $1.68 SBD, the 160th is $1 SBD, the 180th is $1 SBD, and the 200th is $1 SBD... the 300th is just $0.05 SBD and there are even more boosted posts after that.

For the moment users have spent $5,740.159 SBD for promoting posts by ending them to the @null account for "burning". It seems that at this point it is hard for new users to get up in the Promoted page as there are people with more resourced that will just get ahead of them. So what is left for users is to hope that a whale can notice them somewhere along the lower part of the promoted posts and vote for them. This however is not what most authors are looking for by promoting their posts as a whale vote, although can increase the reward for a post usually does not help much in bringing more readers or followers and that is more important for a lot of people than a single time one of their posts earning a bigger reward.

There is the argument that others may also decide to help you by promoting your good posts and paying themselves for the promotion, but then again even before the introduction of this function you could still send SBD or even better Power Up another user if you want to help him grow and further develop on Steemit. You can still do that if you want to support a user on Steemit for what he/she is doing well already as alternative to resorting to the promotion of posts.

The conclusion for the moment is that there is not much point in spending a lot of SBD just to promote yourself on the Promoted page if you are looking to attract more readers and followers. It may help you get bigger reward once for the specific post, hopefully enough to cover your boost cost, but unless you get to the trending page (still quite hard to do for a non-established author or a celebrity author) there won't be much new readers / followers for you. Hopefully in time things may balance and the cost for boosting posts to get at a more normal level to provide a more reasonable entry point for new users to take advantage of the feature...

If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

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