Something just got me thinking, is steemit really the best way to make money with our content ?
I believe the answer is no.
Let me explain, if you had your own blog, like 10 years ago, you could earn money with every one of your articles for life. You post your article on your blog and forever that article was going to bring some money on the table. Of course, if you start a blog now you won't make much money until you have enough "followers" (visits) on your blog. But visits grow over time, so does your revenue.
With steemit we are actually selling our content to steemit for a oneshot payment, sometimes the payments are high, sometimes they are ridiculous. I for example posted a few articles these past days that earned me nothing, now this content is on steemit for free and i didn't get any reward (payment) for it. If i just posted those articles on my personal blog, i could over time have generated income.
Each and every article that you post on your blog has value forever because they are indexed in the search engines. I once owned a swimming pool website/blog where i posted how to articles on how to take care of your swimming pool.
I believe i wrote around 500 articles on that blog, one per day for 500 straight days. That blog earned me 2000 USD per month, even when i stopped working on it. Yes, that's right, free money flowing into my pocket every month, passive income. Steemit is not about passive income but about active income, meaning you need to create new content every day and curate content to make money, and if your articles don't catch any whale or user that has enough power, you won't get paid for it. You are working for free.
What is your thought on this ? Because this is not a social network like facebook, posting pictures of your cat or your food won't make you any money at all. You are not going to be paid to post what you are actually posting on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You only receive rewards for high quality content, and that content could earn you more on your own blog. Let's do some math.
My articles were 600 words long, i wrote 500 of them in 500 days, and that earned me 2000 USD per month, till i sold the site for 50 000 USD. I kept the site for 3 years, i made around 122 000 USD for writing 500 articles, i didn't do any SEO work or anything and the blog was using wordpress, so no expenses. That's 244 USD per article.
Do you believe we are all going to make 244 USD per article of 600 words on steemit ? I don't believe so. Only a few of the steemians are going to make money, most of us are not making money by writing articles. Look at this poor guy, do you think he will stick around for long ?