Through words from Steem inc. it's slowly dawning on me that the Steem blockchain was never intended in the first place as a content creation platform. It was build to distribute a currency.

Steemit.com was the first App to show how a distribution of a currency could be done. But it somehow became the norm.

Recently Hive account@andrarchy wrote this:

It may seem obvious to some, but the challenge is that as the people who architected the protocol, we feel we have a lot of insights into the amazing types of applications that people can build with it. I think that's demonstrated by the fact that when we do build interfaces for it, they seem to strongly influence the interfaces that other people develop afterward.

As far as I know they only build Steemit.com so I'm assuming he means Steemit.com.

We now have tons of apps that can create content in different forms but ultimately they are very close to Steemit.com.

(I guess, Steem inc. saw this too and from there the idea for Smart Media Tokens was born. Every app their own token.)

It was only after Steem Monsters launched their idea that we saw that the Steem blockchain can be used in other, more profitable ways (selling a product (cards), with digital ownership and a cool game).

There still must be a lot of things we have not thought about but are out there for us to build.

Steemit.com has done a fairly ok job at distributing the currency.

STEEM is now in more hands than ever and at current prices I guess anyone can get some (if they still dare).

But it's also becoming clear that everyone competing for the content creation slot on the Steem Blockchain is competing with everyone.

Most of these apps rely on the reward pool for revenue and well, with more apps appearing and a fixed reward pool and a price going down this is going to run pretty thin.

I have been thinking a lot about how to make content creations apps profitable.

It's not easy. But relying on the reward pool so much must end. As recent events has shown, it's not sustainable when price goes down too much.

(And it also makes no sense. Nobody in the real world relies on the new money printing (reward pool) of the FED or ECB for their income. You go after the money that is already out there.)

Today I want to share a crude idea I had. And I'm hoping in the future more people share their ideas cause ultimately we are all in the same boat benefiting from value entering the blockchain.

Could an advertisement model work where the revenue generate from advertisement not only helps the front end but flows back to the content creator and also to the voters?

There are a lot of if's and but's to this idea but I already learned it's a lot better to share ideas with the community and get feedback than go at it alone.

Example:

Let's say Steempeak would introduce advertisement on their site.

Nobody likes advertisements so one would expect users not to use Steempeak but steemit.com instead for an add free experience.

But what if we could create a monetary incentive to use Steempeak because of the advertisements? Could this attract users instead of pushing them away?

The big plus with advertisement is that it can generate revenue from outside the reward pool (payment can still be with STEEM but it must be bought first).

This revenue can be used to pay for costs but also to reward the most popular content creators and their up-voters for bringing in this revenue by buying STEEM from the market with part of the revenue and distribute it back to these two groups.

If's and but's

For this to work it must be possible to somehow track which content creators bring in the most 'eyes' on the advertisements. I'm not sure if this can be done.

If it can then, I'm assuming this will ultimately be the most popular content creators and not always the content that's trending.

It also gives an incentive to upvote the content that is the created by the most popular content creators because you benefit from this advertisement revenue kickback program.

For all this to work it must be possible to somehow track the advertisement revenue potential per user and reward them and their voters accordingly.

Crude idea: An advertisement model where front ends, content creators and voters benefit.

Could an advertisement model work where the revenue generate from advertisement not only helps the front end but flows back to the content creator and also to the voters?

Example:

If's and but's

Other questions that come up:

I am part of witness Hive account@blockbrothers.

We are the creators of Steemify a notification app for your Steemit account for iOS.