One Possible Solution To SteemIt's Promotion Problem

Overview of the Problem

In a great post, @big-lou wrote about one of SteemIt's problems where a post after a period of time does not receive a payout. We can see a related problem to this: the current promotion on SteemIt lacks any benefit to most people who promote content. Quite a few members have written about this, so you can search for them, but in general, audiences do not search for advertising, thus a promotions tab is counter to human behavior.

In the above video, What Is the Average (Mean) and When To Use It, I talk about the average and when we should use it. When we're looking for a data tendency, we may use the average (mean) or median. This relates to advertising because advertisers are generally concerned about what people tend to do, unless they're marketing to an exceptional audience (think of expensive jewelry). Since people do not tend to actively seek out advertising, creating a tab for advertising is self-defeating.

The problem @big-lou highlights is that past content does not get tokens and a poster can only get tokens for a brief period of time - a week. This means that when someone compares YouTube (as an example) to SteemIt, YouTube offers the benefit of continually earning rewards for content.

Tokens For Past Posts

In the SteemIt post I link to above this, I propose one solution that addresses the problem @big-lou discusses and the promotion problem we see:

This is where I would apply the promotions, not on a separate tag. Advertisers could swap their SBD tokens for promotions on popular posts [or targeted posts], which would give the SBD tokens spent to the poster [along with a fee for adding the promotion]. So, as an example, if you wrote a great post about health and an advertiser wanted to sell a product related to your post, the advertiser would send SBD tokens to promote on your post and you would receive the SBD tokens for that post. This way content could still earn tokens provided that people want to advertise on those posts. If we think about it, this is fundamentally what's happening on YouTube and other social media platforms - someone is selling products on old content.

Consider that an old YouTube video does not make money just 'cuz, but because someone can market a product because of that video or content. A person who wrote a great post about health may attract interest from advertisers or marketers, but right now, they can't do anything. Propose SteemIt to any company and they bring this up - "How could we advertise on posts that we think have value or have attracted?" Outside of contacting the author and having the posts re-written as a new post, they can't.

This Will Happen ... Somewhere

Whether SteemIt does this, or another idea, this will happen. Ultimately if a person has a choice between a platform that they can possibly get tokens indefinitely or one that they can get tokens for only a week, they will choose the former. Likewise, advertisers will choose a platform that they can market their product on related content, not on a platform which demarcates advertising. You can read other proposed solutions on the above linked post that propose solutions to the token-for-only-a-week. The one I propose addresses two issues and is something worth considering.