The growth of Hive is dependent on the development of novel front ends that expand Hive's use cases and bring in new users. We have seen this happening at an accelerating pace, with projects ranging from Hive communities, to simple forks of the original Hive.blog front end that have their own communities and token incentives in addition to Hive incentives, like Sports Talk Social and Splintertalk, all the way to full dApps that do things Hive wasn't originally intended for, like Aureal for podcasting and Podping, which actually uses Hive as podcast aggregator infrastructure, lowering bandwidth usage for podcast apps.
But there is another opportunity to expand the Hive ecosystem that has been right there in front of us this whole time but not taken advantage of:
Buying websites and putting their content on Hive.
There are tons of websites for sale on sites like Flippa. You can find anything from blogs to news sites to ecommerce. Many of these sites already have large user bases that could not only bring in revenue, but also could become new Hive users themselves if the site were to promote Hive.
There are a few scenarios where this might work.
Scenario 1
- An individual Hive user or group of users purchases a niche blog or news site running on Wordpress with a steady revenue stream.
- They keep all of the URLs as-is in order to not screw up the site's SEO.
- They instantly increase monetization of all existing and future content by posting to Hive via Wordpress EXXP plugin.
- They increase monetization further by creating buzz with meta-posts about what they are doing.
- They put a portion of ad and/or sales revenue into Hive power for increased influence on Hive or burn it to help decrease Hive supply.
- They promote Hive on the site to bring in new users.
Scenario 2
- Someone buys a profitable ecommerce website with funding from the DHF like this one. (Just as an example. The price on this one is probably a bit steep. We would probably want to test the waters with something cheaper but profitable enough to make back the investment within a reasonable timeframe.)
- If we had smart contracts, this could even be set up where the receiver of the funds has to put up collateral before receiving funding.
- They port the website over to Hive infrastructure while maintaining SEO and customer base through URL redirect scheme.
- They implement an easy way for customers to create a Hive account and offer discounts or other incentives to customers who pay with Hive or post promotional content / reviews, etc.
- They put some or all sales revenue into Hive power for increased influence on Hive or burn it to decrease Hive supply, in effect paying back their debt.
Scenario 3
- I'm sure there are other ways this might work. Do you have any ideas? Share them in the comments.
Risks
Of course, there are some risks to Hive that come with doing something like this, especially when it comes to receiving funding from the DHF. Back when Hive was that other blockchain before the fork, we had teams like DLive come in and get funding, then ditch us to create their dApp on their own blockchain. That wasn't cool at all. We definitely don't want to open the floodgates to allow anyone to do that. So maybe some smart contract infrastructure in place first to help mitigate that possibility would be prudent.
Then there's the possibility that even if the people receiving funding are honest, they just pick a bad website, or one that is doing well at the time but ends up with decreasing traffic and thus revenue. But this could be mitigated by getting together teams of smart people to evaluate their potential before submitting a proposal to the DHF. One great thing about Hive is that there are a lot of eyes here that we can easily point towards things like this. And I could even see someone building tools on Hive that help out with evaluating potential website purchases.
I'm done. I've got things to do, and if you haven't gotten the gist of what I'm saying by now, writing more probably isn't going to help, lol. Anyway, it's just an idea, and I encourage you to poke holes in it and/or tear it to shreds in the comments. Hope you have a great day.