Great that you mentioned about where the money is coming from. In my opinion, rather than speculation, i feel that more can come from quality and unique content. For example, Instead of advertisements, companies can come in and collaborate with the writers with right and niche expertise to talk about their business. Writers with expertise say in environmental sustainability and farming can then talk about say company's businesses and products. The writers' posts can then become a mixture of sponsored posts (with some money going to steemit) and non-sponsored posts.
Unfortunately, looking at the posts, seems that the following phenomena is more dominant:-
- More people want to earn $$$
- More people earn $$$ by writing posts about steem and steemit
- More people feel incentived talking about steem and steemit in most of their posts.
Getting steemians to talk about steem and steemit in their posts has advantages. I feel that it is to influence investors into thinking how great this website is. And to make investors to think there is a lot of potential in steemit and steem. I have been blogging about bitcoin in china at coinbitgold.com. From my experience and my trend data, main media reports and social media has somewhat helped to spur interests in bitcoin buying. The more they report and spread, the more people know, the more the people will be interested to know more about it. = Speculation to buy steem effectively investing in steemit.
I feel that this is not sustainable for a simple reason.
There are more readers than writers in the world.
If readers cannot read what they want to read, they won't go to the website because of the lack of their desired content, or even worse become a website just known for talking about itself and their currency. I rather go mashable, techcrunch, and read what i want to read.
If steemit content does not diversify further and fast enough, sorry i say aloud, steemit and steem WON'T be mainstream.