Girls.
You know why the boobsy travel blogs with happy smiling women do so well on Steem right now?
Same exact reason why all nightclubs waive the cover charge for any hot girls heading in. The bouncer will happily let their entire giggling throng in. As a bouncer you know, girls always move in herds. You also know that everyone else goes where the girls are. The girls are, effectively, what the nightclub is actually selling.
Don't be angry with the girls, I tell you. Smile. The very fact that they are here means that our little club is about to make an absolute shit-ton of money.
How I realized That Steem is Something Else (tm)
I'm a skeptical bastard by nature, and even if I too suddenly got creamed in the face with a few thousand steem-bucks for posting my stunning physique or a riveting tale of how I went to visit the in-laws on here (I never did, this is my first foray into posting the raw me for your pleasure), that by itself wouldn't have convinced me of SHIT. What would be the point? I can see plain as day that the gravy train on this kind of thing is going to run out fast as adoption increases, and Steem's user base booms.
Right now, it's exactly like a rocket that's propelling our brand spanking new space-station-Steem out of the Earth's gravity field. It burns hot, and fast, and roars like Soyuz-1. Everyone is getting crushed by the extreme G (girl) forces. But it's not forever, bank on it. Eventually, the $100k make-up tutorial and boobsy travelogue will have to go the way of the Dinosaur. The community will form it's own peculiar ettiquette, and no one will upvote that content any more for fear of being seen as #foreverlame.
Girls, don't be sad though - because that's where the REAL magic is going to start happening. When the booster rockets detach and explode, after Steem's meteoric rise, we will all find ourselves in zero gravity together. There is going to be a massive amount of trash already posted and slowly orbiting, so the community, the whole internal "culture" of Steem will get damn hungry for real food. Then the Steem platform will seem to get flooded by people who don't have any other place to offer their unique talents and ideas to the world, and to actually be rewarded for it financially. Solitary artists, musicians, computer game programmers, physicists, philosophers, writers, designers, prostitutes, cult leaders - you name it. Everyone who isn't on TV, will be here and they will suddenly be in a reasonable amount of demand.
Bill and Melinda Gates
Sure thing, Bill Gates could always roll in and buy up a lot of Steem Power, then upvote only stuff to do with how it's a wonderful idea to vaccinate babies in the Third World with sketchy injections produced by friendly eugenics-themed pharmacological megacorporations. These posts would then get a lot of money thanks to his strenuous philanthropic effort and his wife can give a speech on CNN about it.
But ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in history this will no longer matter. Just because Gates is doing his thing, doesn't mean YOU can't continue to do yours, and still get your due. The "air time" on Steem is an infinite resource that anybody can grab without jumping over hurdles or paying the gatekeeper. Television is dead in the water with this horrifying type of completely new natural predator looming on its horizon, it doesn't even know what to do or what running away really-really fast, is. Just sits there wiggling its antennae meekly.
All those non-televised artists and philosophers, they will still be right here, and although they probably won't be making bank like someone who shills for the Gates Foundation (or does boobsy travelogues right now), they will likely be doing JUST FINE for themselves, within their own group & tribe who appreciate what they do. That's right, the most exciting part of the platform is that we don't all have to be the same, and like the same shit and be like the laugh track on a bad sitcom, releasing that idiotic hee-hee that probably gives Chucky the demonic doll from the 80ies B-movie some serious creeps.
The fact that Gates makes it rain money means nothing, because even very niche groups of people will not be excluded from collecting the full rewards from their airtime and their truly unique, valuable activities on planet Earth - thanks to their very own niche patrons whose generosity is helped along by an algorithmically enforced code of conduct on the blockchain.
And that's the real reason we need the Girls so bad, and must do our best to cherish them. The more Steem's adoption grows (and it is going to be shit-storm explosive once enough people figure out they can get real money out of this), the more creators and patrons will find themselves meeting each other here on Steem, and falling in love with each other's refreshing quirkiness, nothing like the sanitized, de-sacralized culture of ersatz we all know from years of utterly passive and depressing TV and movie-watching.