If Steem earnings < PPC Blog Advertising --> No mass Steemit adoption
Opportunity cost manifests itself pretty boldly when it comes to money.
It won't take long for Steemit bloggers earning $0.01-$0.10 to realize they could earn more with PPC Ad campaigns on their blogs.
Steem posting rewards are fixed, and concentrated on a minority of users.
I imagine this will continue, unless rewards are forcefully and artificially distributed.
Whereas, there are enough advertisers that more money can potentially be made from PPC campaigns, for most people, who aren't part of the upvote receiving minority.
Non-automated commenting in hopes of catching a whale will not attract mass adoption for two reasons:
- Huge variance in comment payout
- Time invested to produce comments
Students and internet laborers who would otherwise be completing surveys, may be attracted to this however.
Really? Comparing surveys to the blockchain based social platform revolution?
I don't know what you think, but I believe that with time and users comments and vote amounts and the rewards will get more balanced out and your posts will get a more average reward per post. Just like on any other platforms.
There is no value in Steemit besides money that can be extracted from "work". So yes it is directly comparable to online surveys. Steemit really isn't comparable to traditional social media such as Reddit and Facebook. Where the value of those sites from the user's perspectives is in general not monetary at all.
Vote quantities may get more balanced, but certainly not vote rewards.
Simply because it's not economically viable for the majority of people to amass enough SP to become influential. So a few new whales, and the present whales will monopolize upvote disbursements.
Even if Steem price surges, that won't affect SBD much. So it'll be locked in SP - i.e. illiquid.
In such a world, you would need an insane price surge and constant power downs for Steemit post rewards to be significant enough that you would earn more than through PPC blogging, or other online work.