In light of moves by the media conglomerates to control most aspects of online life, including limits on your choice of service providers and rollbacks on protections such as net neutrality and web browsing privacy, a revolution is forming among users that wish to take back control of their data. Many are now looking at services such as Steemit to wrest back control of their social data.
Steemit offers websites a way to reward their users through the use of smart media tokens. These tokens, which per Steemit's whitepaper "can be integrated with websites to align incentives and spur growth, while websites are empowered to adopt sustainable, currency-centric revenue models", allow a website to create an altcoin under its own brand. The website can not only use this altcoin to fundraise, but also to engage its audience, reward contributors, and establish an audience sense of ownership of the website.
This article will look at several ways smart media tokens can be used to promote a website and to encourage user engagement.
Use Case 1: Content Publishers
Imagine you are a blog publisher. One of your greatest concerns is finding a way to promote brand loyalty in light of a growing competitive market. Steemit's smart media tokens can add an altcoin-on-demand layer of functionality on top of your blog.
What does this mean? It means that you can offer your own blog-branded altcoin to your contributors to reward high popularity. You can reward altcoins to readers that actively promote your blog on social media. You can recognize your active forum participants. You can do all of this and more, knowing that not only are you building brand loyalty, but you are also laying out the foundation of a fundraising platform that could theoretically become a line of income for the blog and your blog's most important contributors.
Should your blog become popular enough and should enough opinion-makers come to support your SMT, there is a possibility that your branded altcoin will be traded in the open market, creating a potentially high liquidity opportunity for your organization.
Use Case 2: Forum Moderators
It is difficult to get quality contributors to participate in an online forum. Steemit allows SMTs to not only be given to a group, but a different SMT to be given to the group's subgroup. So, say you have a Reddit-like forum where you are trying to get posts to a new altcoin group. You can set up an SMT that awards a coin for each post on this level of the group, and a different SMT for each sub-group, such as the bitcoin sub-group.
Like use case 1, this could lead to high liquidity should enough opinion-makers support your SMT.
Use Case 3: Third Party Integrations/Content Syndication
Say you have a widget that you provide to blogs which syndicate your stories. It is difficult - if not impossible - to get a reader to click on a third-party link. The attention span of the average reader is about 12 seconds, less than that of a goldfish. It is unreasonable to think that a reader will make it to your widget. Offering an altcoin reward as an enticement can get eyes onto your links and can secure the clickthroughs you are seeking.
For those looking to find new ways to prioritize user engagement and offer users a way to monetize their web use, SMTs may be an option worth considering. It may be that the next altcoin success story will star you.
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