FACEBOOK VS. STEEMIT VS. REDDIT

Of course, we all know what Facebook is, the mother of all content aggregation businesses. Facebook’s goal has been to connect everyone, and with its 2B+ users, it certainly has. And in doing so it has monetized content created by others spectacularly efficiently. Its ubiquitous news feed now earns it a fifth of global digital advertising revenue, in many cases by simply providing a portal to other publisher’s content.

And for new publishers, Facebook has become the main avenue to reach readers. Initially it enabled this to happen organically and publishers built up massive reader bases for their Facebook portals, then in January 2015 it decided to charge publishers for distributing content via their own pages, a change which resulted in many publishers having no choice but to double down and to start paying Facebook to reach their own readers.

Reddit.com is a lively forum for discussing everything under the sun where you vote others posts up and down. It has a very original world wide web vibe to it and is inclusive, free and fiercely independent.
Think decentralizing the Facebook model, and creating an alternate, blockchain-based Facebook, where everybody gets paid for participating. Like Reddit Steemit’s interface is a popularity contest of sorts for surfacing great content.

Steemit is an interesting beast. It launched as an ICO in March 2016 and now has 450,000 accounts, 19 million monthly visits and a bunch of engaged users talking about everything under the sun. Interestingly, “Where does steemit money come from,” is a commonly googled question, and the answer is difficult to understand. There is no evidence of any business model on the site itself.

Shortly after it debuted the Steem currency went to $3 and it’s now nearly back at that level, valuing the market at $1 Billion. And in December Steem Dollars a currency pegged to the US Dollar have spiked to over $20 in value. Quite what is going on with that is hard to understand, and it is far from obvious what lies behind all this wealth beyond a large user base. Notably, it would appear that it is not that easy to join the steemit community at the moment, possibly because of the recent inflation in Steemit Dollars.

But who cares, doesn’t everyone benefit?

It certainly seems that way, except, for a couple of things. Firstly Steemit doesn’t solve the media industry revenue problems as content from existing content producers is still getting shared on Steemit. For Steemit’s own content producers it is a partial solution, albeit a fairly odd one. The community understandably spends a lot of time discussing itself.

Steemit is definitely focused on the individual consumer, or at a stretch the prosumer content creator. And it is definitely not a news-enterprise solution, nor is it meant to be.