Remember when everyone thought that the promotions tab was an awesome new feature? Those were the days. Let me ask you something: When is the last time you actually looked through the promoted tab? The few people I've personally asked seem to be in the same camp as me: the ummm-I-forgot-it-even-existed-camp.
When it first hit the scene I was checking it out fairly often and did some minor experimenting to see how much (if any) effect it had on the payout of my post. Maybe I was doing it wrong but it didn't seem worth the money or experimentation that it took. My main thought and reasoning behind this was that I had my doubts people browsed the tab. (Maybe those doubts could have been alleviated if I had some form of analytics that simply said, "people saw it, you're just an awful writer and no one likes you". That's a completely different topic altogether.)
As we have heard a million times, "attention is the currency of the Internet". Besides selling your private information, most of the current social media revenue machine comes from advertising. People spend a lot of time on these sites and companies/entrepreneurs are willing to spend big bucks to capture a piece of the visibility that the generated traffic has to offer.
Now let's relate this back to SteemIt.
Let's pretend I have more than $1.32 in my bank account and that I'm a big shot Fortune 500 Company interested in advertising in SteemIt. Right now my only option is to advertise via a tab that doesn't get any traffic. (At least I think.) In my opinion, the promoted tab will capture less and less visibility over time.
So here's the suggestion that most of you will hate me for:
Let's advertise on the front page. Not just the front page but the front page of every category.
"Kryptik, you should be ashamed of yourself. You're a sell-out. What a scum bag! Burn that witch for suggesting that we look at the something as appalling as ads. I will never support looking at ads on this site."
Well guys, you kind of already do, when you search things for things on SteemIt.
I've heard people saying that they would never support having ads on SteemIt but I've never heard of people bitching about these minimally invasive ads that pop-up after a quick search.
"He's right. Ads have already infiltrated the sanctity of this holy website. Now that I've realized this I hate him even more."
Being as they're already here and not that big of a fuss let's talk about a possible way that we could make advertising work on SteemIt.
Ads shouldn't be in a post format but a different one altogether.
Google Adsense text sort of ad?
Ads must be displayed in a way that isn't invasive to SteemIt's users.
No one wants a giant banner being waved in their face. I think a couple small ads would never hurt anyone.
Ads shouldn't be "flaggable".
I could see petty competitors down-voting each other rather than spending more on advertising. People buying ad-space need some security knowing their ad won't be tampered with by outside competitors.
Ads shouldn't be able to earn Steem.
Leeching pay-outs from people whom work hard and didn't pay to be on the front page isn't fair in my opinion. Also, if they can't be flagged why should they garner the ability to be up-voted?
Ads that are NSFW or discriminatory should never be allowed on the front page.
I'm all for free speech. No need to run off potential new users with these kinds of things though.
Any one looking to start an advertising campaign on SteemIt MUST buy the advertising space with SBD/Steem.
People wanting to pay with fiat can buy it on the exchanges or seek a third party that will do the work for them. If the ad- space isn't bought with our crypto-tokens it doesn't help our community.
All Steem/SBD spent on advertising will be placed in a holding account and "burned".
I think this would be a great way to get some of the Steem off of the exchanges that's currently driving down the prices. When the price is up, Steem WILL get more attention. Positive attention is what we need.
I was just throwing out casual suggestions here. I haven't put hours of thought into this but I don't think it takes much thought to realize that a revenue boost like this would be great for Steem all around. I'm 100% certain that there are minds much more brilliant than myself with a way system to make this work or just a better way in general.