Are you a Whale or Dolphin? - You Have Millions of Dollars Waiting to be Picked Up!
Whales and dolphins simply by virtue of their SP holdings, stand to make millions per year without breaking a sweat.
How?
Probably several paths they can take, but I can see two obvious approaches.
1. Leasing positions on a botlists
New users can invest time into building networks, and producing content that the community rewards and iterating until they succeed (or abandon ship) - or they can pay $300+/month to Whale A. or Large Dolphin. B to obtain a position on an upvote list.
The user (i.e. the lease holder) can expect to recoup on his investment through direct votes on posts (though the extent to which vote arbitrage can be scaled may be limited by the limit by the necessary restriction on upvote frequency for it to be optimal).
With a mixture of direct vote arbitrage and expecting other users to front-run the whale/dolphin (and the resulting rewards from those front-run votes). Or uniquely the latter.
With a mixture of the two methods mentioned above, and expecting enough posts to go viral by other users regarding a whale vote as a sign of a potentially viral post. Or uniquely the latter.
Or simply because of the social value of a vote from a particular respected user.
2. Content distribution charge
Whales/Dolphins or users tracked by valuable bots can charge users to post their work on their blogs per post.
I imagine users would pay perhaps up to $500 per post on a whale blog (or more).
These whales/dolphins/or otherwise can post a certain amount per day such that posts are still expected to be sufficiently rewarded after the four-post-penalty.
They can even create several accounts to circumvent the four post penalty!
To maximize income, whales/dolphins would probably permute the above mentioned methods.
Is this wrong?
I'm a believer in the free-market. This is just economic activity. And a pretty great business opportunity, in my opinion.
I think Thousands for dolphins not millions. Good concepts in this post though. Could you check out my latest post your feedback would be appreciated.
True.
Alright, I'll check it out.
Good observation, although I would not like to see that happen. It would take away the incentive for people to actually read the posts.
What if the content is interesting?
Why would top-quality content makers pay whales/dolphins?
I've seen several top-quality content makers get little rewards. See @sigmajin 's posts.
(recently they've been increasingly upvoted but still) There are several similar examples.
Reason is usually that they post at low-traffic hours, or poorly market their content.
Or there may just be newbies that don't want to build an account from scratch
Good point. But I think low quality content will be most prominent on those paid whale lists.
Very entrepreneurial of you; this was debated before July 4th, at the time I think we just said; let's see what happens. Steemit will follow the path of least resistance at the end of the day.
Cg
Ah. Was indeed "obvious" then :)
Yep. I think it's a rare win-win situation. Minnows get exposure, and whales/dolphins make money.
And so on the cycle goes as minnows amass more SP...
I've started a reputation repair service. ;)
hahaha!