RE: Steemit Enterprise Ad Platform: A solution to vote bot abuse
I am so absolutely floored by this post that I'm not even sure where to begin! Never before have I read a post that so exactly mirrored my own thoughts and ideas and, as someone who deals primarily with content promotion on Steem, I have a lot of thoughts and ideas on the matter!
This project, if successful, could single-handedly drive up the value and price of STEEM.
STEEM is primarily a utility token, however, like every other utility token hardly anyone actually buys it for its utility. The price of the token is completely driven by speculation and the fact that we're in a cryptocurrency craze.
The utility of the STEEM token is, very simply, promoting posts on websites built on top of the Steem platform. SteemIt.com could bring in tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue based on its current size and usage (there's sites where you can look this up).
The reason it doesn't do that is again because the price of STEEM is being driven up by speculation so it doesn't need any actual revenue coming in. I think most of us take that for granted, but it may not last forever - or even for much longer.
If actual corporations (or "enterprise partners" as @zthomas puts it here) were buying millions of dollars worth of STEEM each year to advertise on the platform, then STEEM would be the first utility token to actually be used for its utility in any meaningful way.
I believe that the entire cryptocurrency community, and perhaps even more than that, is just waiting to see when or if these things will actually start to have a real-world use. If STEEM can be the first to do it in a meaningful way it will skyrocket the valuation of the token.
I believe that is very possible, and what is missing is a project like this. Once something like this is built, then the entire Steem community should become the salespeople for it. The more money we bring in to USE Steem for its actual purpose the more the price will rise, benefitting us all.
My hats off to you @zthomas! This post deserves to be at the top of the trending page in my opinion. I've bought a nice upvote for it from a voting bot and I will share it and encourage everyone to upvote it.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you make this project a reality!
Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate the support. I posted this a few days ago and didn't get much traction at all. So votes from you and @jerrybanfield really means a lot to me.
To address some of the issues from the comments, mostly regarding the negatives of advertising. I completely agree and understand where you guys are coming from and as I mentioned, I'm trying to create a new type of marketing product for Steem that works with the community. I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what that will look like yet but I'm hoping I can help brands to create real engaging content on platform. It should be a win-win for both the brand and the community.
Also I'm being very selective with who I'm targeting for sales, so strictly enterprise fortune 500 companies. Because of the way that Steemit and other Steem apps are structured, there's not actually a lot of room for a ton of ad buyers in the traditional sense. I estimate it's probably not even capable at servicing half a dozen large clients. I think Steemit need to add better notification, ability to follow tags etc to really enable more targeting to support more customers.
Additionally, I'm sure it's a lot easier to sell marketing services to ICO companies right now but I'll avoid that completely as I don't think it proves much and won't helps the price of Steem or the community.
I want to stress that I'll only be going after a handful of suitable large clients with very hand on sales cycles.
I want companies to promote real engaging posts that they already are creating through their existing campaigns. For example, I met with Google's Firebase dev team for Pushtable.com, I would love Google to promote a video series on d.tube to teach serverless development with Firebase's new hosting feature etc. Maybe Microsoft could do a tour of their office and promote some recruitment content etc. I think ultimately ads should as close to real content as possible. We are just so used to shitty ads that we instantly have negative emotions about anything related to ads / marketing, but as I mentioned I think Steem can change this.
@yabapmatt, Thanks for the PM I'll follow up with you guys in the chat rooms.
Wow! So amazed to see this direction, definitely this is the direction community should think and evolve. This will open up so many possibilities and future growth in wast number of opportunities.
I am with you and definitely help in getting word out.