In my last post I spoke a little about the growth of Steemit and the community and some of the things that is so important to get right. I have met some of Steemit INC (the company that runs the platform) face to face and over skype. CEO @ned and one of the founders @dan as well as VP of marketing, Mitchell. These guys are all blazing an amazing trail in this phenomenon called crypto currency. And not just in Steemit.
@dan is passionate about disrupting what he believes is a broken world system. He has played with a number of projects since applying his considerable skills to Crypto. Dan graduated in Engineering-Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in First he did Bitshares, after getting involved with Bitcoin in the early days of crypto and being alarmed at the centralized exchanges being arbitrarily shut down. He started BitShares and BitUSD and in a quest for better adoption of crypto. From there he invented the Graphene technology that powers the Steem blockchain. As a co founder of Steemit INC Dan helped create the DAPP (Distributed Application) that is Steemit, the platform that we are all writing on.
@ned is the business and financial side of Steemit, but he holds a mean conversation on technology and has made the crypto world his home from his start in financial analysis in the early 2010's. He has a powerful vision and a drive to disrupt the attention economy as dominated by giants like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Simply put, why must they make all the money out of their clients creating all the content and mind space?
The attention economy
"Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act. (Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)" *
"Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. Put simply by Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it." *
In business the monetisation of this is simple. Get a consumers attention, create interest to keep that attention, create desire through plying them with messages (advertising) and then call them to action (spend money). TV, billboards, sponsorship of sports stars, Print and the internet all use this basic model. And the ability of the internet and technology far surpassed any previous tool to get this process, referred to as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action).
Very early on in the internet boom of the 1990's, marketers realised this was made for them. They could now far more easily connect with their audience. Soon followed the social media boom, the internet of connecting. But the early attempts mainly tried subscription, and people just did not want to pay for this new thing. Enter the attention economy and its most successful proponent, Facebook.
What does Facebook do?
Simple, they sell your attention to advertisers. And they make money out of this by keeping you hooked. Think about it, out of a 24 hour day, many people spend easily 2 hours a day on Facebook. That is 14 hours a week, 60 hours a month and 730 hours a year!
So Facebook sells your attention to make money. What value does this attention have. If someone sells your time to make money, that is called employment right? So by deductive reasoning Facebook employes you. Let us look at what this translates to in income they could pay you. I use sample countries with the average wage per hour. This is indicative, and many Steemit people would earn far more. As expected the first world numbers are far greater, but it is all relative. All numbers are in Dollars
Staggering to think that using these conservative numbers you should be earning between 3000 and 18000 dollars a year !
I know that is not how it works, and that the "contract" you have is the fun and sharing and then they make money out of you.
Facebook has 2 billion active users, more than a quarter of the world population! And China does not even use Facebook. But this means they only make on average about 17c a year per active user. Far less than the numbers above. But in the aggregate they give nothing to you for your effort, besides the joy of connecting.
Steemit and the gateway
Enter @dan and @ned, and the creation of Steemit. Why not give some back. Yes you will not earn an amazing living on Steemit in general. The revenue model is just a little too thin in the long term, unless massive additional value is added. But you can earn something if that is what you want. Steem currently gives you a little for posts based on your votes you get, allocated out of the daily money creation pool. So they print more money and give you a share. Your share is based on how the community (or those that sees your post) rates you. If you get average $5 per post, and do 5 posts a week, you make around 1300 dollars a year. That seems a lot closer to the table of earnings above than 0 does it not.
Steem is a step in the right direction, and is addressing some of the hyper proffits of AIDA. But it needs to massively change its model to survive and make you more money. To do this they must upgrade the interface and mobile entry, bring us communities and ADVERTISE.
Most of us will not mind that as long as we share in the money being made out of our attention righ?
Great post and the comparison with Facebook is welcome, we use it as an advertising to bring some FB users into Steemit and it works great. Thank you.
Thanks for your comment. Love the platform and posting all of this on FB to my friends and theirs ... use the enemy to destroy the enemy .. Art of War
Take care FB have already closed two of our FB accounts just by advertising Steemit to the Thai people. But sure have to go fight on their own ground as they using us to make money. :)
Indeed. And they throttle traffic. It is their business so one can expect that as you start really challenging them
Thank you