Steemit has had as close to a fairy tale start as one could hope for, and now what lies ahead is more challenging and will define the future of Steemit. If one could use a single word to describe what concerns Steemit right now, it will be LIQUIDITY.
Today we are see the new promoted post section appearing on our steemit accounts, but will this be enough to counter the liquidity issue? I doubt, and here are my reasons for it.
- Most people on steemit are here to make money out of it.
- Sure some people will invest money for their posts to be read by more people and eventually earn from it.
- But even as the steemit user base grows, on internet in general, there are way more readers than writers.
- So the investment from writers will not be much and steemit economy will remain a closed ecosystem.
There is a need to link steemit with an ecosystem which is much larger than steemit and which can use steemit to earn money. This ecosystem, as you all can guess is, advertising. But with bringing in advertisers will bring it's own challenges.
One of the suggestions I've read across on Steemit is that brands can buy Steem Power to become whales and up vote content. But that will be very bad for your steemit feed and it could end up looking like this:
Another, more constructive way to bring in the advertisers could be to introduce banner ad's on posts. It could look like this:
The advertisers will be charged for ads on impression based and the cost of impressions will be calculated through an algorithm that accommodates the popularity of the post. More popular the post higher the price of the ad impression.To pay for these posts advertisers will need to buy Steem from the Exchange and it will bring in the liquidity needed.
There's another thing Steemit might need to look into, like I mentioned earlier, there will always be more readers than writers on internet. The UI of steemit need to accommodate this reality. One improvement that comes to mind is the proper allocation of tags. There can be a certain number of tags which are fixed and posts need to be catagorized under atleast one of these. Let's call these Master tags. Then there can be Sub tags, which can be used as search terms for posts.
This is my view for taking Steemit to the next level, what is your opinion of it? What more can we do to make it better, please share your suggestions and feedback.