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RE: The Case For Advertising on Steem-Based Websites
Selling enough advertising to employ someone to operate it is already quite difficult. Looking at Facebook as an example is a little off because Facebook is ridiculously huge. I doubt very much there is enough desire to advertise to Steemit users by paying in Steem to justify a front-end paying the costs of running the ads in the first place.
Even if you allowed paying in fiat, so advertisers who weren't used to Steem already could come in, a small social media site whose traffic is declining isn't a terribly attractive market. So it's hard for me to see how this covers expenses, much less drives revenue.
I do advertising for a living...and you are dead wrong. Do you know even know how many pageviews Steemit.com has? It's in the millions per month through search engine alone at this point, a very targeted audience of people who live primarily in the US, Europe and Korea.
Great point @cryptoctopus!!!
I'm glad to see a marketing professional confirm that. Most active Steemians have produced a shitload of keywords for advertisers to use for targeting.
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Thank you, @tcpolymath. I'm not sure why so many people think advertising will save STEEM, when it's not even STEEM we're talking about, but Steemit Inc., which, as far as I know, despite their currently taking questions and discussing things like we're all suddenly a part of their think tank, is still a privately owned and ran business, which, if they did sell advertising (and managed to make anything out of it), would be under no obligation whatsoever to share it with STEEM holders.
Plus, ads that are worth their money require the ability to target, which means tracking people's data, which is part of the reason why we're not on Facebook or Twitter, right? So, why would we want that?
Hey Glen
Just a note on your final point. The data being tracked would unlikely be personal as there is no requirement here to add any of those details. I suspect it would be targeted advertising, based on the topics you up-vote, the tags you use, the places in which you leave comments - this is all open and freely available for anyone to compile.
I watched a presentation at SteemFest, the final one of the week where a chap was discussing advertising. If I remember correctly, they are working on a tool similar to how you set up an advert on Facebook. (Goes to hunt for presentations...) Waivio, that's the app. I have no idea where they are up to...
EDIT: Found the presentaton
https://steemit.com/waivio/@grampo/steemfest-growing-steem-ecosystem
Okay, so I watched the Waivio presentation. Whoever is going to push this needs to get away from using the term advertising, and use the guy's term, attention trading. And then explain that it's not for Steemit, but for STEEM. Because everything he said had nothing to do with traditional clickable display advertising on a site.
I'm glad I watched it because I really didn't want to have to argue with you. :)
Worth a watch if only for that term, which I'd forgotten was there.
So you are OK with me looking at the categories you post in, comment in, vote on, at what time, and performing a full text search of everything you've written, as long as I call it Attention Trading when I present it to potential advertisers? :D
Just read your post on this topic. I'm glad I ended up waiting before answering this one.
The answer is, no, not really, I'm not, but hey, in some forms, it's already happening, and you've been doing it by pulling information off the blockchain.
That said, I suppose we could call everything we do here advertising if we wanted to go that route. It's all business and there's not really any deep connection going on. STEEMfest and other STEEM meetups are just calculated pressing of the flesh—everyone wants attention and everyone wants a piece of the Steemit Golden Goose (delegation for projects).
If that's truly all this is, then I probably should get out now. I ran a newspaper business for 15 years. I sold advertising. I've had blogs off and on. I've tried Google ads, affiliate links, trying to sell products, etc. None of it really worked for me.
Then I came here, where there was nothing between me and the buyer, which actually wasn't really a buyer but a reward pool allocator who really wasn't spending anything, in fact, they were eventually being paid something to say I should be paid something.
But somehow that works for me. I've not earned a lot, but I've earned a hundred times more, at least, than I ever did doing any other thing on line. Even at 34 cent STEEM.
Businesses, however, are going to want results. A lot of people here will need to be willing to spend money for any of this to truly work, not just get rewarded for looking at a video or whatever offers there might be. But since STEEM powered up is our only means without fiat or other crypto somewhere to make more STEEM, and since the vast majority of us here are minnows and red fishes, that means the folks that are going to need to be doing the majority of the buying are larger dolphins on up, because they will be the ones who will be able to afford 150 STEEM sports shoes (which is probably a bargain at today's prices).
And therein lies the rub. We start spending STEEM, we have less to make it with. We don't spend the STEEM, the businesses won't stay in business, at least not on the blockchain.
Fyrstikken suggested a big old banner ad at the top of the page for $20,000. I liked his other two ideas, so I shouldn't be too harsh on this third one, but there's no way anyone is going to pay for that, let alone 365 of them, or however many more you will need to meet his $7.3 million. Banner advertising doesn't work the same way as it does in a newspaper, or on television. There's cost per click, and there's cost per million, and there's cost per action. The smart business isn't going to go CPC or cpm, they're going to go per action or purchase, like an affiliate link.
And then someone is going to need to sell these ads. Someone who knows how. Someone or someones who won't come cheap, and if they're smart, they won't get paid on commission.
I don't know. We've got this blockchain, we've got this inflationary setup, and we've got consumers. Waivio is a way that at least sounds like it's in keeping with that, but none of this instantly does anything for STEEM. And while we're tied to the broader market, we're still going to go up and mostly down, apparently, with it.
My thoughts. Probably should stop now and get on with other things. :)