Promoted Posts are Now Not Working at All and You are Literally Burning Money With Then
Do you remember when the post promotion was announced, it wasn't that long ago actually. Back then I was concerned that the feature will not be really useful and it seems that my concerns have become a reality. The Promoted page has initially turned into a battlefield on who will pay the most to have his post on top, then it was overtaken mostly by authors that already had high reputation and serious follower base and now... now it seems to be slowly dying. With less posts getting promoted and with less paid to promote them with the reason behind that simply being that there is really no point due to the lack of effect. The only thing that remains useful and actually working is the fact that the Steem Dollars spent for promotion get burned.
I have been testing a couple of times the feature by promoting a few of my posts to see the actual effect. Sure, maybe I don't have a post worth going trending (don't I really), but that does not mean that I don't have good posts right? My success so far was in getting a bit of boost of the post reward from a few votes mostly from Whales after promoting a post. This was totally missing the point of authors getting new readers by promoting their posts, but was exactly what was happening. Pretty much nobody besides some Whales and the users that did promote their posts was visiting that page and the second group was not paying much attention as it was not there to vote for "the competition".
Yesterday I have decided to give another chance of the Promoted page by promoting a post that needed to get more attention and raise some awareness. The post in question was this one: Bug Report: Issues on Steemit and Different Steem Tools with IE11 where I talk about some of the issues that Steemit currently has under Internet Explorer 11 as well as cover over 10 different Steem Tools that aslo don't properly work under IE11. My posts reporting bugs have been a total failure so far, a failure in terms of getting attention or at least that was the impression I was getting.
This time I wanted to make the post more visible and get more attention and I have decided to Promote it, so I did and I did use enough SBD to make sure it stays among the top 20 promoted posts. Now, 24 hours later nothing much has changed with that post, and I've been looking at other highly ranked posts on the Promoted page and there is not much happening with them either. Seems that even the Whales are not visiting that page anymore...
So i just wanted to let you know that I will not be using the Promote feature anymore, and so should you as it apparently has turned into a pointless and useless way to waste your hard earned Steem Dollars without any effect. And I'm not talking about getting rewards here... I'm talking about getting more people to read your posts and maybe even react to them, not to mention to actually gain some new followers. There are different ways that can be more effective and completely free such as using the Steemit Chat for example, not spamming with links to your posts.
Promoting a post on the Promoted page has literally become burning SBD and nothing more...
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
Did you like what you have just read? Check my other posts on steemit @cryptos
I agree with you
I didn't test it a lot, because I never expected much of it, but I did do some tests, because I wanted to know, to learn ... and you're right; it's pointless
it's too soon, that promotion button is only going to work once there are at least 100.000 users, which is still very low, while now we're at 10.000 users
but I do think the voting slider is doing a lot of good!
As a firefox & chrome user, I wouldn't even click on that based on my own interests.
As a reader and tiny curator (0.01$ worth of vote), even if you paid 1000$ for promotion, I'd still not click it. I read IE 11 and I LOL'ed (just sharing my reaction). I wouldn't have any interest in reading it or upvoting it.
Content is relevant to what will have success or not. This may not be the type of content to attract upvotes. Obviously, no meaningful conclusion can be extrapolated about the usefulness of "promoted" from that case.
On the other hand, I went over the top 20+ or so, they were like 5-6 in the 0-1$, 6-7 in the 1-10$, 3 in the 10-100$ range and 3 in the 100-1000$ range. So their ratios are decent.
I think the expectations were too high, it was not the miracle that people were expecting it to be ...
I don't mind it exists, in fact it's a good thing, but the total effect of it is minuscule at this point ... it didn't really change much ... posts counts are still going down, $SBD is still going down etc etc ...
I think that's why cryptos is somewhat frustrated ... it's not just about his posts or the promote button itself, it's that there's something fundamentally wrong at this stage of the game and the promote button didn't solve it ... that's the issue
The biggest problem right now, even if I have 0.01$ worth of vote, is that I don't see much good content to upvote.
Now imagine that the platform can give out thousands of dollar per day - perhaps 20-30k. We have to ask ourselves if there are 200-300 posts that can really earn those 100$ each...
too me the biggest problem is that 30 whales determine everything now, they consume 90% of the voting power and that's a problem
there are 10.000 regular active users per week ... that's 90.000 short from the absolute minimum this system needs to work; that's the real problem
right now those whales are determining everything ... they should dare to trust the system by lowering their own voting power consumption with 90%, so those thousands upon thousands of other votes will actually mean something
as in; if the whales were to adjust themselves to reality; we're 90% short on users, so they need to put their voting slider on 10% ... your vote would be worth 0.10 instead of 0.01 ... and that would matter
this is how I see it;
step 1; the whales lower their vote with 90%
step 2; all of a sudden everybody else's vote goes up x10 ... lot's of excitement
step 3; very fast a lot of people will return, we don't need new users (at first/for now), if we can just get a bunch of people back, that will already make a big difference
step 4; as in; after the internal balance has been restored; directly contacting known quality authors and tell them there's money to be made ... get real authors, known journalists and writers
step 5: seo; this is totally being ignored now; the best option steemit has right now to attract new users is from google traffic; more and more articles will rank in google and bring in new users
step 6 ... all pieces finally came together and all numbers will go up steadily until a story that was first published on steemit makes headline news all over the world; and boom: overnight 1.000.000 new users and price x10
step 7; we're all rich ... hahaha
I've checked in on the Promoted posts page a few times, just to see how other people were doing there. By and large, it didn't seem like most were doing any better for promoting their posts than they could have done without promotion. So, the feature didn't seem worth it to me, and I don't check in there much anymore, because I don't see anything changing (thus far) regarding the value of promoted posts to the authors.
Yes I remember it and in the moment it is really not working well with the promoted posts. :)
I had used the promo feature two days ago and was able to catch a whale. I invested about 1.50 SBD and turned them into nearly 30$ payout. So maybe it depends.
some whales do go to the promote page from time to time, just to upvote some posts, so it looks as if it's working, but that's completely artificial
I'm sure they are looking, as they wanted to establish that feature. But also they're only voting content they like. So I guess, I will continue to invest some (between $1 and $2) SBDs from time to time. I also started to promote other artists by promoting their posts with a small amount, just to show my appreciation.
it's not totally useless, it's just that it didn't really change much
and yes, I do that to, sometimes when I see a really good post, I might burn $1 to support it
It was a terrible idea to begin with. It never should have been implemented. Straight garbage!!
Agreed. See my recent post on this https://steemit.com/proposal/@nonlinearone/a-proposal-to-make-promoted-posts-worth-the-price-without-spamming-up-steemit-com
When bots are doing most of the upvoting, you can promote information however you want and it won't make a difference.
I could tell his would happen. We need an unobtrusive way to view promoted.
Maybe it should pop up in the new feed trending feed or active feed
Maybe it should show up every 5th post in your home feed something thats not too annoying but atill he's it out to. New audiences .
On burning , while that will be good I wish they would t burn u till we drive Steem power below 90percent. It really doesn't make sense to power up until then and burning just delays he inevitable.
The problem with promoted posts is tied to the core problem with the platform itself: low quality content. Launching an ad model on Steem just a few months after launch is asking for trouble. You attract quality advertisers by having a large, high value user base with a strong ROI. We are a small community to begin with, and the eyeballs that reach the Promoted posts tab is even smaller. The economics of how much an advertiser needs to spend to get adequate reach are not transparent (any digital marketer is going to want more data like their impressions, click through rate, etc). The result is limited opportunity and a poor experience for advertisers. Steemit definitely has the long term potential to build a sustainable ad model, but it's clear this was a rushed, half-hearted attempt to inject more demand into the market. Unfortunately, it's just a drop in the bucket right now compared to the substantial sell-off occurring each week by the early stakeholders.