content creation was treated only as a token distribution mechanism with no attention paid to how it could be harnessed to capture value is embarrassing.
I tend to agree. The content here is a product. This same product generates revenue everywhere else. You mentioned revenue generated through advertising. Over the past few years this product(content) also generates revenue in the form of donations or tips. Consumers now are dishing out millions annually in that fashion. The money comes directly from the consumer's wallet, falls neatly into the creator's wallet, with a middleman taking a hefty percentage. For instance Youtube will take a 30% cut, Twitch takes a 50% cut. The current going rate is rather high. Meanwhile Hive offers the consumer and creator a far better deal. Staking Hive and donating or tipping through votes cuts out that middleman completely. Consumer can even have their money back if they so choose. Creators can setup solid revenue streams rather than depending on sporadic donations.
So when Hive started up and people went on their onboarding binge, I started to cringe because no focus was placed onboarding paying consumers. It went straight back to Steem's biggest folly which was attempting to attract amateurs with the promise of getting paid. So here we are filling our shelves with this product, and not opening the doors to any customers. Those customers become the investors under this business model. They're typically loyal and will gladly throw their money away on other platforms. They also do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to content distribution, by sharing links across social media feeds, simply because they liked something and share buttons are easy to push. Of course spamming twitter is the wrong way to go about spreading content. That's usually left up to the people who actually enjoyed it and want others to see.
Any dapp, now and into the future, depends on consumers and their money. Onboarding those types should be at least some of the focus. Those consumers should be the ones out there asking their favorite content creators to come over here so everyone can stop getting ripped off by those greedy middlemen as well. Right now, those consumers have no clue they're being ripped off. They have no clue there's a better deal out there, known as Hive.
All your points are valid. But I'd like to add that the most important group may be those people who never interact with the chain but just read.
By the way, my daughter just told me that there is a content creator fund on Tik Tok. But that some content creators have complained that when they've participated in being rewarded from it, they've see their viewcounts drop. That's just the kind of shenanigans all those centralized Web 2.0 platforms pull all the time.
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Those are called consumers, my friend. Nothing wrong with attracting every breed of consumer. Wouldn't things be interesting if those particular consumers who cannot interact with the chain could still be interacted with. On a second layer, maybe they can comment, and perhaps I could upvote those comments, but they cannot claim any sort of reward until there's a wallet, with Hive power/RC connected to it, purchased by the consumer.
Perhaps DApps could have guest accounts in store for visitors to use for dropping a quick comment. Guest commentators could register quickly with their email address or Web 2.0 identity to be able to claim their rewards later.
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Yup. So there's the market of consumers willing to pay, then there's a market that needs a bit of persuasion. Both are equally valuable and worth tapping in to.