Earlier today I resteemed a couple of posts relating to advertising, a hot topic in light of recent events. Could advertising, or 'attention trading' bring new money into Steem and keep the majority happy?
One thing is for sure, I don't want to see irrelevant flashing images by the side of this text, and I would like to be paid too - it's my attention being caught after all......
The last presentation of SteemFest 3 started around 4:30 pm and was titled 'Growing Steem Ecosystem'. The blurb mentioned 
The speakers name was Alex Gruntsev (
maybe you'll be the last speaker ever at SteemFest; Am I hinting at something?
Anything you have to tell us Mr P? :P
I do think the video is worth a watch, it should start at 2 hours 30 ish, but if not, that's where to skip to.
Advertising: 1
When we produce a post, we are competing against other posts for attention. In a way, we are advertising ourselves/our work - paintings/photos/ideas etc. And as we all should know by now, the best work normally doesn't receive the most attention. You can see 
Advertising: 2
The 'new' form of advertising, as discussed by Alex in the video, is more about focused advertisements and not posts, and hopefully no flashing bs on the side of the screen.
Could this form of advertising:
- source new investment into STEEM/Steem Power?
- be smart about what ads are presented?
- pay us, not Steemit inc or application you are using to Steem?
Some answers of sorts in a moment, but first, a short story.
It was 1999, and I was on my placement year working in a small IT department. My friend had told me about an program that paid you as long as you were active at your PC and had the program running. This program presented adverts across the bottom of your screen - where the Windows taskbar is.
The owners of this program would pay you by the hour and if i remember correctly, a little more if an advert was clicked. For me, this bar was a bit evasive and so I didn't use it much when I was working. (It was easy to game with another program that moved your mouse cursor intermittently).
All Advantage was their name, and paying us for our attention (or at least they thought) was their game. Could we have something like this for Steem in the future? (Is this what
New money for old eyes
Alex discusses a smarter approach than All Advantage (who sent me a $30 cheque) which is a a tab with pending advertisements 'for our attention'. We choose when we want to see the list of ads, it could be managed by ignoring/hiding advertisers etc, we could potentially barter -' I'll not watch this for less than 5 STEEM thank you very much', and the advertisers could bid against each other (burn the lowest bid?).
So these businesses, or advertisers, are bidding against each other for our attention. New money comes in to pay the consumer for doing something - reading, watching, (up-voting? :P ). The payment for something like watching a video clip, could be paid in STEEM (in 3 seconds), an SMT (errr), or maybe an up-vote on the comment to say that you watched it (comment box doesn't appear until the end of the video?).
Why would businesses come to Steem to advertise?
Cause they can see everything we have written, every tag we've used, every tag we have voted on, every account that has voted for our interesting post on the latest running shoes, and, how much money we have in our wallets.
Eg. Get me a list of everyone who's posted about #running #jogging #fitness in the past 2 months, and has upvoted this guys post on these new trainers, and who's got over 150 liquid STEEM in their wallet.
Probably not the best example, but yeah, there's lots of data to work with.
Focused advertising, built on every interaction that's taken place on Steem - a transparent view of this should attract advertisers, they don't even have to snoop, it's there for all to see.
Who's getting paid?
Me, hopefully. I downloaded the app/extension, which is smart like Steem Keychain or MetaMask and knows when to appear, the advertisements are targeted to me, and I'm the one choosing to consume them or not - surely I'm the one getting paid!
I am not the first or the 50th person to state this but I think that advertising has the potential to bring new revenue into Steem, which seems needed more than ever right now. If I was given a list, which I could chose not to view until I was ready, of adverts that I knew were tailored to me, I would be OK with taking a quick look every now and then.
Each application (busy,steve,partiko,etc) could source the ads, or an app/browser extension like Steem Keychain / MetaMask / Waivio / Whoever gets there first.
I asked this question in a comment earlier...
So you are OK with me looking at the categories you post in, comment in, vote on, at what time, and performing a full text search of everything you've written, as long as I call it attention trading when I present it to potential advertisers?
Not like we have any choice!
Let's hope I didn't up-vote any NSFW this week.
Messy, but hopefully some food for thought.
Cheers!
Asher