My thoughts on Smart Media Tokens

So @ned announced Smart Media Tokens this week and generated a lot of excitement. I have to admit I was also excited. As a user of Steemit for the past three months I've long felt it is a shame that all publishing and social media platforms don't work like Steemit - okay, except for the bots and the relentless "follow me" and shameless self-promotion and love-fests. There's definitely some really great quality content here getting rewarded handsomely and seamlessly without advertising, and that I love.

So now, as I see it, SMT brings the potential to spread that love everywhere. It also has the advantage that it makes it less attractive for people to create lots of Steemit clones because the parameters of how it works doesn't quite match what the want - and in turn allows for many parallel experiments in rewards systems that perhaps Steemit can learn from and improve itself by over time.

However, having read the whitepaper although I see an awful lot of detail about, well, the details of using SMT and a bunch of theory on market making and such, I find it lacking on real-world economic examples of why it will work. As in cause widespread adoption on non-Steemit websites.

I understand as a creator of popular content it is great that I get rewarded. As a commenter on a website, it is great that I get rewarded. As an upvoter, it is great that I get rewarded for highlighting good content and comments. However as a creator of a website, publishing hub, forum, social media site... what is my interest in using SMT? And more to the point why will people put money into the ICO and continue to prop up the price of my SMT token by buying it?

Granted there is an obvious answer to this question - advertising. And granted the whitepaper talks, somewhat briefly, how advertisers would pay to promote content on a site, just as they can post on Steemit. But, it doesn't really talk about the mechanism for advertisers to make that happen. Do adverts on a website appear as regular content and just get promoted like regular posts on Steemit? Or does a website have special advertiser identities attached to more traditional advertising spaces which are "promoted" by advertiser payments and subject to up/down voting as in Steemit? Or... something else? Really, the benefits to content producers, commenters and visitors is clear - but how advertising and other paid content fits in - not so clear.

To be honest I don't really see how the economy of Steem works anyway - who is buying STEEM other than people speculating on some future increase of value, or who believe that depositing money into STEEM will benefit them via more SteemPower such that they too make more - sounds somewhat incestuous if you ask me :-)

Maybe as a website owner who runs traditional adds from Google or some other ad network, I make a commitment to spend a certain amount of that revenue buying my own tokens which would drive the price up - enough at least to compensate for inflation caused by issuing content and upvote rewards. Presumably all viewing and other interaction data would be public on the Steem blockchain so people could audit me. Maybe that kind of mechanism should be talked about in the whitepaper? Certainly, unless advertising is served through the platform somehow (ie. promoted content is the only way) then how revenue from it might benefit content providers and commenters is unclear.

There is also an issue of "the network effect". If I create an SMT then how does outrageous popularity on my site affect content popularity across all SMT based sites? The answer is, as best I can tell, not at all. I'll never see, even voluntarily, content from SMT tokens appearing on Steemit. Maybe that would be a nice feature? The ability to federate the "hot" and "trending" topics in some way? Even if only to insert links to refer me back to the source where I'd see any local "advertising" or promoted content in association with what I want to see. As best I can tell SMT creates a forest of disjoint systems, not a network that could work together.

That said, I still think SMT is an important project. I still think it will be very beneficial for STEEM value, Steemit, and spread of use of blockchain technology in content publishing. I just still have some gaps in my cognition around how it could become "the" thing.

To contrast I would mention the Basic Attention Token. It embraces the idea that there are independent advertisers. It allows content producer and consumer to share ad revenue. It disintermediates consumer from advertiser to provide privacy. It also allows rewards to go to content producers who aren't even in "the system". What it doesn't include is the commenter and upvoting / quality content highlighting system of Steemit.

Maybe there is an option for something that is a hybrid of these systems. Maybe SMT alone can be made to incorporate an advertiser add revenue system via promoted content that includes via contracts repurchase of the token via fees, view, and click through payments from the promoted content fees?

Or maybe this is all already there in the whitepaper and I missed it? In which case I think plainer and more exemplary spelling out of that could be done.

Sources:

• Announcing Smart Media Token
• Smart Media Tokens whitepaper
• Basic Attention Token