Quote from: iamnotback on July 25, 2016, 06:07:43 AM

Quote from: magicalacademy on July 20, 2016, 03:12:23 AM

RIP steem power holders.

http://thestringpuller.com/2016/07/a-steeming-bubble/

That article is very myopic:

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Over the past two years, Qntra authors have gotten paid for their work directly by MPEx investors as advertised. At a later time, if someone wants to buy the whole of Qntra, shareholders will get paid for their shares.

...

In essence Steemit users are getting paid by Bitcoin investors via exchanges, similar to Qntra. However these Bitcoin investors interested in STEEM are few and as such there is less than a total of 1,000 BTC worth of bids for STEEM across all exchanges.

If someone holds a large stash of bitcoins, what would compel him to ever buy STEEM? (outside of speculating of course) In the case of Qntra, even before revenue is realized, the company may sell for more than investors paid per share. A STEEM investor never has ownership over any of the content published on Steemit. For them buying STEEM is essentially a gracious donation to content creators.

What he means is that the content is public on the blockchain and is not owned by anyone. Anyone can use that data from the blockchain.

But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.

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The only hope for Steemit is incentivizing professional content creators to contribute. Professional filmmakers, television producers, comic authors, etc., would be the only content rational Bitcoin investors would be willing to purchase. Even in this case due to the mode of monetization, awarding content payouts will always be optional.

A professional television producer creates a pilot with a $10,000 budget. After a great deal of market testing, the producer realizes the show has great potential with his target audiences. One option for distribution is he can release it for free on a service like YouTube and embed it in a Steemit blog post. Here he is at the whim of generosity of STEEM users. Its risky distributing in this channel as STEEM users are clearly irrational and wont pay a realistic price for consuming the media. Another option is the producer to sell it to Netflix as an exclusive for $1mn up front and a possible royalty deal after a certain number of episodes aired. The latter option for the producer will likely prevent him from posting the content on Steemit.

It seems it would be very difficult for Steemit to incentivize professional content creators directly.

He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

And indie artists do give away free promos on their work in order to upsell other work or paraphernalia.

Indie artists often jam with their fans so they are in tune with what to create. Also they iterate in smaller morsels, and get feedback along the way.

Putting some content on the blockchain, doesn't mean creators have to put all their content on the blockchain.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in terms of monetizing content consumption. It's very clear Bitcoin investors, (which makes up 98% of the STEEM market), are paying content creators. How much the content creators are paid by these Bitcoin investors is determined by the curators. That's the entirety of the system in its current form. So I wrote the article asking, "What tangible value do Bitcoin investors get in return for STEEM."

In the context of professional content creation, where independent creators are a subset, the entirety of one's living is earned through selling produced content. For a filmmaker this is charging people to see their movie, for a author this is charging people to read their work, for a game developer it's people buying and playing their game. Steemit in no way in its current form gives Bitcoin investors any direct value. Sure, you may say professionals dabble in Steemit as you stated above, but it will in no way facilitate the development of professional content. If a Bitcoin investor can directly broker a deal with a producer for a cut of a production's revenue, vs buying STEEM power... From a strict investment point of view, buying STEEM power as a Bitcoin investor looking to make a legitimate ROI (one procured from actual productivity), is essentially a gracious donation to STEEM users.

>But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.

Shut the fuck up for a second, and stop making assumptions. A social network is not valuable at all. If so Reddit would be profitable already (after a decade or something), and it wouldn't have taken Facebook a quarter of a billion dollars and a decade to become profitable. Social networks are indicative of bubbles. Just because Facebook was able to avoid having their bubble completely popped doesn't make them a success story. In fact research has shown consuming large amounts of social media usually reduces critical thinking and overall intellect, so trying to attribute ANY value to a social network seems retarded. How about people actually go outside and socialize, instead of sitting behind a computer screen pretending to socialize?

There is no value to be mined from Steemit from the "users' ongoing use of the site", because they aren't producing anything of value. Using Steemit will not yield flying cars, or cold fusion.

>He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

Dude. You are so uninformed in regards to the entertainment marketing machine. Most indie artist who do it out of love, say Diggable Planets, still have to eat, they just care less about the monetization of their content. They are the ones where "enough" is an reachable goal. For these people the most efficient machine for distributing their work is the best machine. Steemit is not one of them.

Lets say the value in Steemit is the eyeballs attached. Well how do you get eyeballs to see your content? Steem Power. So you go and buy a bunch of Steem and conver it to Steem Power just to upvote your content visibility. It makes the front page of course, but you find that there is a 1% click through rate, that is only 1% of people convert to your personal website from Steemit. On top of that only 10% of that 1% actually purchases something. Until there is a sane market for Steem, (which I doubt there ever will be), the PPC bids for Youtube, Google, etc. ads are far more efficient, and produce far more revenue per dollar invested. Even then the targeted nature of internet advertising has to be done with a great deal of finesse or you end up losing money on your advertising campaign due to low conversion rates.

If brand advertising becomes the bread and butter of Steemit, then the indie creator automatically gets pushed out of the trending stack. In this case large corporations are the STEEM power whales and use Steem as essentially a giant billboard.

Either way, STEEM has a lot of problems to figure out before its valuable. And honestly due to lack of acknowledgement of them or outright denial, I don't see it becoming valuable ever.

Your idealistic assumptions are myopic. I'm only making realistic evaluations, with valid concerns. Not one person has convinced me I wouldn't be a bagholder if I were to buy STEEM, and it seems other BTC investors are realizing this as the price dropped 0.0059 to 0.0041 since the release of my article.