Two posts made me think thoughts (dangerous!) so here is my response all blended up into one post.
wrote about the failings of Hive and attention versus $
wrote about ads on Hive
Both allude to the fact that on Hive currently we incentivise playing the system rather than the act of creation. While we are on the surface a content creator community, in fact a lot of people are doing the bare minimum to get votes or get funding.
An option, as evidenced by Peakd, is to run ads and pay out from that ad revenue. This is how Web 2 generally works, and it is why we can NOT pay for most of the content we consume.
As the linked authors point out, how many of us open Hive blogs as our early morning routine versus our favourite news site or social media app?
I spend a LOT of time on YouTube consuming content, barely 10 minutes here despite trying.
One of the things I like about the ad-driven monetization model is it rewards user activity rather than passive "automatically vote for my buddies when they post something without reading it".
The negative is ... well, ads.
BUT that negative is also a big reason we do pay for things that are otherwise ad-supported. I pay for YouTube and Duolingo purely to not see ads, that could work on Hive too :)
For eg. Peakd could cost some small delegation or so many Hive or HBD per month to not see ads, with that income being pooled and paid out to the people who get the logged in views.
Those who don't get readers would still get their usual automated follow votes but everyone else would be rewarded for creating stuff people actually consume!
One of the things Leo do very well is you can log in without a Hive account. I think that is very smart - people can think about or know about the crypto aspects later, onboard them first with the value being the content and the community!