Is Advertising The End Of Steemit?
Is our beloved Steemit about to die? Has the death knell been sounded, alerting the internet graveyard to open its gates for yet another failed experiment?
The other day the @steemitblog announced that Steemit is preparing to test the use of advertising on the site. To a casual observer this is a rather innocuous statement. We live in the 21st century and advertising is as much a part of our lives as the motor car.
However to the more established denizens of Steemit, when it comes to revenue generating ideas there couldn't have been a worse announcement to make. Especially as the Steemit whitepaper mentions on more than one occasion, that it is a scandalous state of affairs that Facebook, Twitter, et. al., make billions of dollars without sharing it with the people who made it possible.
Shut That Door
There is a saying; shutting the door after the horse has bolted. It basically means that you have acted way after the time to act has passed, and I'm afraid that is what Steemit inc. are doing right now.
Everyone is running around shutting the doors to the stables, however the horses have left a long time ago, and it makes me somewhat angry.
The simple fact is, I like a lot of the guys on the Steemit team and some of the top witnesses as well, however they have really, royally screwed this one up and here's why.
Opportunity Lost
When Steemit was riding high in August of 2016, I, like many others, was very excited at where this new disruptive tech could end up. Steemit was a game changer, instead of being a commodity to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder, we were pioneers, controllers of our own destiny.
At the time I saw many confused and unfocused marketing campaigns springing up everywhere. However these weren't Steemit inc. initiatives, they were user-led marketing drives which really left a lot to be desired.
One such campaign I remember, was the Steemit billboard. I'm struggling to come up with a bigger waste of time, money and space, than a billboard advert for a blogging platform. Yet it was voted up to the tune of around $1,600.
No, that's not a typo, I said sixteen hundred dollars.
I can guarantee you that the billboard did not bring one solitary user to the site. Why would it? You're driving on the highway and you see a billboard for a site you've never heard of. In the two seconds it takes you to drive past, you've already forgotten about it.
Then there were various copycat billboard "campaigns", desperately trying to get rewards similar to the original idea.
I watched and waited, until I could hold my tongue no more.
I made posts, I posted responses to articles, I made as much noise as I could. Over and over again I gave suggestions for how Steemit inc. could utilise the then millions of dollars worth of Steem into an effective marketing campaign.
Not just me either, there were many good suggestions from Steemians about how we could take this platform forwards and grow it to the size it deserves to be.
In the end, I gave up. Nobody was listening, nobody cared, I was told over and over again, that I needed patience because Steemit was in beta-test mode. I'm not one to wallow in negativity for too long so I accepted that HQ-led marketing would never happen.
Why Advertising Won't Work
As I mentioned above, it feels like Steemit inc. are shutting doors that no longer need to be shut, or rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
That sounds harsh, however it is true. Advertising won't work on Steemit in the way it works on Facebook and the other big hitters.
This is because those platforms have user details with Facebook being the absolute leader in information farming. They know your name, age, sex, location, where you went to school, what makes you laugh, cry, love. They know what makes you happy, what makes you sad.
They know what products you like, they know what pages you visit when you leave Facebook. This, is an advertisers dream, because now you can advertise your product to relevant people, something you can't do as accurately in a newspaper or TV ad.
However this is not the case for Steemit, because of course the Whitepaper specifically says, that the Facebook model is lame and unfair...
Maybe though they are just going to put Google adwords adverts onto our posts? Well doesn't that then still put Steemit in the "profiting from its users" club?
Add to those points, that most people use adblocker these days, so a very low amount of them will even be seen, let alone clicked on.
So the choices are try and copy Facebook and fail miserably. Or exploit your existing users content, something that your whitepaper expressly says it will never do.
A Perfect Advertising Model
OK, so as not to just post a downer article about how we're all doomed, I will lay out the way advertising could work on Steemit. Even though experience tells me that my ideas will be completely ignored, I'll still give it a go.
As somebody who has worked in the ad sales industry, and therefore spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of marketing mangers and directors, along with various product managers and even CEOs, I am acutely aware of the expectations of a marketing budget.
To put it simply, advertisers want a return on investment (ROI), in other words, for every dollar, pound, or yen they spend, they expect to make that money back, plus a profit of a predetermined percentage. Simple.
Imagine being able to go to a marketing director and say, not only can I get you an ROI on your budget, I'll get all, some, or even more of that budget back into your bank account!
WHA-????
Yes, by using the Utopian.io model, whereby you create supervised voting bots to vote up anyone creating quality copy about your product.
If Dale's Widgets loads up an ad bot with $100,000 then each one of their votes is going to be pretty chunky. Especially when the price of Steem is a dollar or more.
Imagine the delight of the marketing director, as he realises that not only is he getting loads of user-generated marketing going. He is bypassing the millions of copies of adblocker that stop people ever seeing his advert.
Once the campaign was finished, he'd power down and get back his budget, having sold loads of product and generated a buzz around his widgets.
I pitched this very idea to an advertising person I know, and they were very interested. Their take was that once the user base got to around five million, it was worth taking a little risk to see how it went.
Conclusion
There are a lot of good people working for Steemit whom I like a lot. However I'm extremely frustrated with them, especially @ned who sits at the top of the tree. If it wasn't for @dantheman and @ned I wouldn't be writing this, and we would still be in the same world of lame social media choices. Therefore I will always have time for them, but as anyone who has followed me knows, I am not afraid to speak my mind.
I would hope that they would rethink their advertising strategy, whatever it is, and think about how to create a sustainable system. Because otherwise Steemit will die, and we'll all be sitting here wondering how and why that was allowed to happen.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT STEEMIT ADVERTISING, IS IT A GOOD OR BAD THING? MAYBE YOU FEEL IT WON'T AFFECT USER EXPERIENCE AND WE SHOULD JUST GET ON WITH IT? OR PERHAPS LIKE ME, YOU FEEL IT CAN BE DONE IN BETTER WAYS?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: Callum Skelton on Unsplash
Since you asked for opinions, and the situation didn't improve since I wrote this 47 days ago, let me quote myself from Musing, in answer to the question Are ads the thing Steem needs for its future sustainability?
I think the main problem is how to get 5M people on steemit. It looks like with every solution how to onboard new users we got less people to join.
What solutions? I haven't seen any active marketing from Steemit inc. from day one, and this is the problem. They kept saying, no, we don't want to market Steemit because we're in beta...
Now look.
Cg
geeks, rich kids, and pragmatic business people do not operate in the same worlds...
(Censorship flagging wars involving hundreds of thousand of dollar accounts, from 'big people' - in a ideological temper tantrum..? I ask ya...)
Solutions in regard how to sign up new accounts.
@oldtimer, I see, I'm interested though, can you actually name one of these solutions?
Cg
It hasn’t bothered me at all. I’m glad they went with the implementation that you don’t see ads when logged in. I do think that should be advertised as a “selling point” for creating an account to go ad free.
I do wish they’d partnered with a crypto friendly service like Anonymous Ads, or fully revamped the official blockchain promoted system as well, so that we users could get in on advertising opportunities that broadly distribute the value to all token holders. Integrating Basic Attention Token as it develops would also be intriguing.
edit I also like the ad model you describe and see it having great potential. I believe https://oracle-d.com is tackling just that angle.
Well they'd better scrap their entire whitepaper then, because it goes against everything Steemit stood for in the beginning.
I too would love to see some cross-blockchain collaboration happening; together we are stronger!
Cg
The white paper may have been a little naively idealistic in that sense, but I think it’s also important to note the nature of the blockchain. We all know our content posted to Steem is completely open & permanent. Hundreds and thousands of sites could potentially pull your content from the chain, slap ads on it and monetize your work with no compensation other than exposure. Steemit holding out against that would be a moral point alone, and of course some folks will purposefully choose front ends with no ads so their inclusion has to be a measured business decision.
On the plus side of the equation, as you noted... it’s pretty much “dumb ad” systems due to the fact that Steemit isn’t engaging in much more in depth data collection/brokering/targeting like the closed systems of normal social media. I do feel more comfortable about that.
Steemit Inc. also does suck at transparency so we’ll probably never know, but it would be nice if this ancillary ad revenue was targeted for specific purpose. If say, it covered all hosting & server costs with a remainder going into marketing & outreach, I’d feel like the value was still staying within the community and not destroying the spirit of sharing the value either.
I can say with 100% assurance, that absolutely zero will go on marketing. The day I see Steemit market, is the day that @ned leaves the company.
I saw a quote the other day from @dantheman saying he was really disappointed that even though things were in place, most of his original dream has not come to pass re Steemit.
He also said he was pushed out...
Cg
I think it reeks of panic and desperation.
It certainly does... I'm just hoping that out of the ashes of this desperation, a phoenix of organisation and good ideas rises and delivers us all from this mess.
Cg
Smoke.io got ads, its a steem clone. I'm fine with it. Just hope that they have more revenue. Can switch to Partiko, Busy or steempeak if Steemit ads annoys you.
Posted using Partiko Android
I have a feeling that switching to those others will have no effect, seeing as they all reflect what happens on Steemit anyway.
Plus it's not about me being annoyed, it is about Steemit focusing their energies in the right areas, and advertising is in my opinion, not the right area to be focusing on.
Cg
Oh no now steemit will be flooded with unnecessary advertisement.
Yup.
Cg
It’s already here. If you’re not noticing it, it’s not that bad! I just see it sometimes when I check notifications in the Steemify app on my phone and read something in their inbuilt browser where I’m not logged into my user account.
See, here’s the ad I got on this post... only I don’t see it logged in.
I imagine these ads are just capturing some revenue from casual web surfers who stumble on a good article through a search engine.
Well to me steemit was never going to be around for long and was never a long term solution for the blockchain but a proof of concept if people want to use steemit and see ads so be it. Most of the serious users long abandoned steemit for dapps and we should continue to encourage noobs to move to platforms that actually get development and improvements
When you say 'abandoned steemit for dapps'; what exactly do you mean?
Are you talking about Busy and Steempeak and so on?
If so, then all of those dapps, run from the Steemit api, what happens on Steemit, happens on them as well.
Cg
Dapps are actually dependent on Steemit? Isn't there a way to do it independently?
Posted using Partiko Android
@celestal, yes as far as I'm aware... I think that Steemmonsters might be independent of Steemit. However every other dapp I've encountered on the Steem blockchain, requires you to have a Steemit account.
Cg
Now I think I got it. I watched a vlog of @exyle where he told that several dapps were relying on full nodes provided by Steemit Inc. and that was the reason why there is/was reliance on Steemit. However, Steemit Inc. just released an update where they managed to cut the RAM requirement to run a full node from four hundred something gigs down to 61 gigs, so that probably will help decentralization and reduce dependence on Steemit Inc.
Yes, I mean put less reliance on steemit as a front end and content housing platform! Let the others take over and you just run your API and reduce costs like hosting media etc
I’m not saying a cut off but more of a migration to dapps as apposed to steemit
Posted using Partiko iOS
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100% agree @cryptogee on every count and your marketing idea is GREAT!