Cui bono? Or: Who benefits from Google AdSense on Steemit?

When it first came to my attention that Steemit will adopt Google Adsense on it’s platform I had mixed feelings. I immediately felt both; this is a great chance to strength to increase value of steem tokens,by using this revenues to buy back steem and therefore create an artificial demand on the market. But also I felt a rush of disgust, disliking Googles conduct of business, which could be discribed as “centralization in persona”. Did idealists, developers and early adopters put so much effort into creating a platform like this just to have it’s principles sold out for easy money?

I want to recapture my thoughts:

The fundamental problem

The baseline problem is that steemit and no other blockchain have intrinsic value. And that means that it doesn’t produce any. Like fiat people need to be convinced into valuing it, by having a sufficient big amount of people spending “real money” (lol fiat) on it. If that happens to be the case, everything would be fine. Newly created token would have a demand and people can get their posts rewarded by selling them on the markets.

But that means that there has to be enough people out there willing to pay for these tokens. But many people on this platform are here because they want the easy money. They are not willing to strengthen this ecosystem by powering up their accounts. Steemit can only grow when people add “real value” to this platform, all their fancy bla bla might be nice but doesn’t pay the bills.

I have to admit that I am surprised to see steem still – or again – get traded for 46 dollar cents. After this long of a bear marked a great valuation of this blockchain. And my congratulations to the devs for that. But the important question is, how will things move from here? We have seen these drastic cuts Steemit Inc. had to make in order to be here until today.

Google money for steem value??

Having ads on the pages will generate income for Steemit Inc. But how will they use this income? Will they take aforementioned actions and buy back steem from the markets to drive up prices? Will they use it to get back personnel they had to let go in lack of funds?

But how much of an impact will that have? Is it enough to ensure the survival of the steem blockchain? Maybe a bit of all. @steemitblog Maybe someone of steemit’s staff got some answers for me?

Will it be worth to sell out a key principle?

I think most of us got here because the promise of getting rid of these big players like YouTube, Facebook and similar tech giants. They developed so much influence that they are literally gatekeeper on the internet. They can collect any data and process it, they can moderate any user interaction by excluding unwanted elements and using their financial power to lobby governments all around the globe.

Do we really want to buy in those elements we try to get rid? I really dislike google for tracking my digital footprints and recent revelations of google collecting location data from smartphones even with this feature turned off in androids own settings confirmed my slight tendencies of paranoia. Lol but to be serious: This is harassment . I do not wish them to do it, additional I opt out in their settings and they still do it. Fuck you Google! Source

You still can opt out...

Well you still can choose to not support Google Ads on steemit. Simply by installing an adblocker or a browser which has one build in like brave.

I for myself am aware and concerned about those privacy things and therefore use adblocker and scriptblocker to repel unwanted trails. But being able to enable ads for single sites I will disable my adblocker on steemit in good faith into them reinvesting these revenues into our community.

Thank you for your time! What do you think of the subject, please post in the comments!