When a new user hears about or joins Steemit, what do you think their first impression is? It's probably focused on the user being paid for creating and upvoting content regardless of their success on the platform. While this is a new and awesome concept, it's just a small part of the coming wave of disruption caused by its impactful creation.
Steemit is the flagship dapp created on the Steem blockchain and the pioneer of a brand new business model now adopted by many dapps since, created on top of Steem. Steemit's business model is massively disruptive to the social media space and seriously threatens platforms like Facebook and YouTube. I will mention that Steem dapps are early in development and are not as polished as the big players but everything starts somewhere.
Steemit offers a superior user experience, it pays ALL its users big or small because a social media site isn't anything without it's community. Steemit has no centrally run censorships, the community is self governed and doesn't need to worry about pissing off advertisers because there are none. No advertisements? How is this even possible? Where will revenues come from to grow the business? This is where the disruptive part comes in.
Let's look at Facebook for example. Mark Zuckerberg started with full creative control. His best ideas coming to fruition with no pushback, focused on building a top notch user experience. His idea, Facebook, is a huge success so he decides to go public. Why? because the stock market is a good place to raise capital to grow the business and also it will make him and his partners filthy rich. But Mark finds out that being a public company comes with a lot of pressure, pressure to increase revenues. Facebook has over a billion users so finding ways to monetize through advertisement is easy and their revenue explodes and the value of Facebook reaches hundreds of billions. Mark and his partners are billionaires and Facebook is a massive success but he can't help feel that he's lost creative control and the platform isn't what he originally envisioned. Mark is the CEO but it's not a dictatorship, he has to clear his ideas by the board members and they've all become puppets of capitalism, ultimately controlled by their revenue stream. Mark is stuck between a rock and hard place. He wants his users to be able to express themselves freely but he's forced to sensor Facebook to preserve the revenue stream by keeping his advertisers happy which keeps the hedge fund investors happy. Facebook is stuck in the traditional business model where revenue dictates the value of his company.
Steemit's creators are able to keep full creative control because the value of the Steem token isn't determined by revenue. Steem tokens actually have functions built in and create demand for the tokens because if this. Steem tokens give influence and bandwidth on the platform, which creates demand from users, dapps and corporations.
Steemit's business model is revolutionary. It solves many big problems that social media platforms and business' have through the traditional revenue model. Personally I feel like we're just beginning to see a shift to these dapp platforms and are certainly the future. Facebook and YouTube type platforms would have to undergo a complete business overhaul to compete but where would that leave their current shareholders? It sounds complicated and they may not be able to transition and by that point the damage to their business' would be done.
G'day