RE: Steemit.com generating roughly $20k per month in Ad Revenue
I think this challenges the claim that Steem is decentralised - on Wordpress, they store my data on centralised servers but I get ad revenue based on the traffic I generate.
On Steem the data is stored on decentralised servers (unless it's video) and Steem keeps all the add revenue from the traffic we generate.
I know that's just fiat, and the crypto's (Steem distribution) is different, but that aspect at least is about as centralised as it gets... all the fiat from the ad revenue all of us generate flowing to one company.
Maybe it doesn't matter because that's what's required to stablise the platform...?
I dunno, it's just an interesting/ challenging thing to think about.
I don't think it would pass the 'pub layman test' - If it came up in conversation down the pub people would laugh at me if I claimed Steem was decentralised on the basis of what's happening with the ads.
On a separate note I've earned a decent WP ad revenue since 2015, which has declined rapidly in the last couple of years. When Ellie was making her predictions about proposed future revenue in a Discord show last year i did comment that that was guff, I was right. She was way over-optimistic.
That 20K figure isn't going to increase. The only way is down. There's too much competition out there. If they maintain that figure, that would be a real achievement.
Yea I think eventually users need to be getting part of the advertising revenue. Steemit,Inc is in a tough spot, they have to pay the developers otherwise they will quit, but they don't have anything to pay them with unless they sell steem, which further drives down prices and makes them have to sell even more steem down the road. It's not sustainable. Generating revenue via advertising is the lesser of two evils, though perhaps once (if) this place gets bigger, perhaps they can use excess revenue to buy up steem and burn it, or come up with some other way of giving that ad revenue back to the people that are actually responsible for generating it.
Yes fair point - ad revenue is better than selling Steem!
I'm not convinced it's sound to rely on ad revenue going forwards....a nice stop-gap for 2020 and that's about it.
Returning the ad revenue to users, even if it's a tiny proportion, would be a great pro-steem, anti FB marketing tool come to think of it.
Yep, and if there was a way to do it based on views per post without it being game-able, it would help reward those that put out good (possibly popular) content that don't get many votes on here. The steem rewards would be a bonus.