Another day sees the Steem ecosystem racing ahead.
As I scanned my feed this morning, I came across a post announcing SportsTube. This is the addition of the video component to this community. In my mind, this is a sensible move since sports' highlights are all over the Internet and people love to see clips of their favorite players and teams.
This is a project that I am really excited about. The market for sports of enormous. Just looking at the revenues of the 3 major sports in the United States, we see the NFL rakes in about $20B a year, $9B for MLB, and roughly the same for the NBA.
We all know there are billions of fans globally. Soccer (football to those outside the U.S.) is still the most popular sport with global revenues that exceed the ones I just mentioned. This, of course, is omitting the entire collegiate ranks which see NCAA football and basketball as two of highest rates sports in the country.
The other reason why I am so confident about this project is the fact that people have been discussing and debating sports online for years. There are blogs all over the place covering every imaginable sport you can think of. It breaks down into teams with fans assembling to enjoy interacting and debating other like-minded people.
My point is that very few people are not into sports on some level. This means the potential market for #sportstalk is a fair percentage of the entire population of the world.
There is one drawback to all of this in my opinion. It actually is not exclusive to Sportstalk but applies to all communities being formed on Steem Engine.
The model that is used takes the open source code from Steemit.com. This presents a challenge since it is a site that received little attention over the past few years. To me, it resembles something out of the 1990s, not a site that excites people in the mobile age.
We also see the content arranged in a way that presents nothing more than a streaming mess going by. There are few ways to search and all categorization is relegated to just the tags applied. Of course, this leads to people tagging popular groups as opposed to appropriate ones.
Since it is all open source, hopefully some of the coders on here are hard at work to alleviate this. For Sportstalk, I think the potential is great if sub-categories could be set up. It could break down into individuals sports, then the different leagues, and finally, by team.
The same could apply to a community like 
My point with all of this is we could see the potential of having a few communities take off because they enjoy the first mover advantage. While it might see great to have a different site for every idea, that might be counter-productive. In my mind, the goal should be to have a few communities with an overall reach and then see other smaller communities form under that umbrella.
Here again, we could see the same type of stacking idea that is presently forming on Steem. I would believe that a token could be created and applied to a sub-category the same way as it is for the larger ones.
In this instance, using Sportstalk as the example, we might see a community form that supports the University of Alabama football. That community could create a token that rewards them for their activity. However, since it is on the Sportstalk platform, the SPORTS token is also earned.
Once again, with open source coding, I think if someone puts this together, it would spread through the ecosystem like wild fire.
The main advantage to Sportstalk is the reason people have for participating. Over the years, we saw the ill-effects of promising people huge payouts for their blogging. This led to many leaving, frustrated when it did not materialize. Few look at a platform such as this as a business. Perhaps we will see that mindset evolve in the future, but it is not here today for the most part.
Sportstalk offers a different attraction. There is the financial component to it yet this is not the main focus. Instead, the idea of people assembling with fans of their favorite sports/team and interacting holds a bigger attraction. It answers the "why" without only stressing the monetary component.
With billions of sports fans around the world, does the idea of getting 10 million seem that outrageous? One of the biggest advantages Steem has is a proven content/reward system. For the past three years, we utilized an upvote system that paid out both creators and curators. Naturally, we are tweaking things in an attempt to improve the platform but we keep on plugging along. This is a tremendous advantage over most other chains out there that general in nature.
Steem is ideal for monetizing the social interaction process. In my mind, sports is near the top of the list in terms of potential. Imagine the idea of fans supplementing their incomes by interacting about their favorite sports team. Do you think that would go over well with people? I certainly do.
Here again, since this is something that is new, present Steemians are early adopters. We are the ones who are helping to build up these newer platforms. For that reason, payouts can be akin to the early days of Steem when the trending page had multi-thousand dollar S.T.U.
The vision of Sportstalk is a sound one in my opinion. The addition of video makes that platform even more powerful. Personally, I believe it is a rather easy sell to people. We are not looking at changing what people are doing, only where they do it.
All over the Internet, people are posting about and watching videos pertaining to sports. Our job is simply to get them to do it on Steem. Sportstalk could be a vehicle, if designed properly, that brings them here.
Which brings us back to the development issue: All these projects need sites that are modern in their functionality along with an ease of use associated with them. We can market a platform like Sportstalk all we want. Unless, however, people can find what they are seeking, they will not remain.
Communities break down into smaller communities. We will not realize our potential on here until that is something that is easy to do. Even if it is a community of 5 people, I need to be able to find them on here.
At this point, that is difficult, if not impossible.
I hope some of these new Steem-Engine communities take notice of this and work to get it alleviated.
That said, I hope Sportstalk takes off since it has the possibility to attract tens of millions of people over time. Sports are played in every country around the world with a vast percentage of the population being fans of some type.
This is something that we need to capitalize upon.
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