It’s time to bang that same old drum again.
About the wasted opportunity that we are currently having with hive.
The fact that we have an army of content creators banging out valuable content on a daily basis to give away for free. Yes, we get rewarded in hive but that is from internal payments whereas there is a huge amount of value from our content externally and money that could be brought back into Hive from advertising.
I am hoping to work towards better SEO for hive as I go forward and would encourage a lot of you to do the same when possible. That will be the end goal for producing content on hive as well as creating more engagement on the platform.
We did give a shot back in the very early day but I think that we can do better going forward.
@abh12345/help-hive-sprinkle-a-little-seo-on-your-posts
We can see how active the twitter promotion has become lately and how much that has increased our reach. While it will encourage a lot more people to read the content we write on here, ultimately I don’t see it getting us that many new users as web3 takes a lot longer to understand and to integrate with.
Unfortunately bringing these new eyeballs to hive won’t do much for the eco-system as we are giving our content away for free. I have nothing against that in theory but part of joining a decentralized platform for me was the thought that we would be able to monetize our content over time and earn for the effort that we are putting in.
As it stands, the price of hive will continue to fall without investment or speculation to drive it. While lots of users have been buying the token and powering up, there has been no sign of any large investors coming to push the price and that is because there is no business model for the token. Hive gets paid out and then it gets staked or sold. Not exactly a good investment unless you want to think very long term. We also know that not many people think long term in the crypto world but rather in short term gains.
We do hope that an app will bring in enough users to create organic investment in small amounts by a large number of the community. We do have that to an extent but with the number of users that we currently have it is not enough to offset the selling. We would need to 100x our user base and get them to buy into the system of ownership of the platform. Becoming investors as well as users.
As I have stated in the past that should always be the end goal for a decentralized eco-system but we will never get there without solid foundations first of all.
A solid road-map to create this vision and real plans to make that happen. That requires more than just building cool things and hoping that people will come.
This requires us to define what hive is.
What is Hive?
I would state to somebody that hive is an eco-system for example.
So if I went to an investor to tell them about hive.
I would say that hive is an eco-system for building apps and transaction based businesses on.
These can be social apps, gaming apps, shops, art, personal brands ect...
Anything that can be built or tokenized.
These apps will then create the value for hive by increasing demand for hive itself.
- Games have users, they need a hive wallet to play.
- Games have items, you need hive to buy them.
- Blogs create content, you need hive to advertise on them.
- Shops sell products, you need hive to purchase them.
So if an investor wants to put money into hive or build on the eco-system there should be a clear path to do so. At the moment we don’t have that.
There should be a clear way to build an app or create a business on hive without having to think about it from the very bottom.
Sign up here. Do this. Create a community for it. Earn ad revenue. Incentivise the community to promote your business. Simple process.
Hive improvement community
I was looking at the Hive improvement community earlier which is ran by some of our top witnesses. There are some brilliant pieces of coding and some unique and original ideas for hive utility from the witnesses but very little on the user experience. It’s actually quite amusing if it wasn’t so tragic but you can tell who is a witness by the title of the posts. Examples of the posts so far.
Witnesses:
- Social Layers & Reward Pools - Let's Talk About It
- Atomic Swaps with Hive Core Integration
- Hive Technical Vision
- Hivemind API being updated to allow following mute lists
- Debate: at which rate should the non-airdropped stake be converted to HBD
Users:
- Brainstorming 10 DAILY Hive Improvement Ideas For 10 Days
- Our ’attract-users-to-Hive' problem - halfway solved
- Introducing Hive Incubator - A Marketing Proposal Project
- Who are the Consumers on Hive? (Bilingual)
- Tools for Building Sustainable Communities
Don’t get me wrong. I totally appreciate the time and effort that our witnesses put into developing hive and while I can’t understand where they are going with a lot of these posts I’m sure the more technical minded people on the chain will. Those however are the minority in the world.
But you can clearly see the divide between the witnesses technical vision for hive and users wanting to improve the experience of being on hive. For me as with most things in life. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. Keep improving hive capabilities but also add the tools to make a clean and simple user experience. A lot of the users don’t have the skills to do this but we do have the vision to see it.
The majority of people want a plug and play experience. They want to be able to link to hive as easy as Facebook or twitter and just use a fun site. Those are the people being left behind. These technical details do nothing for them and while important we mustn’t forget about the usability side of the chain either.
Users are the life blood of hive and the reason it is here. The 1% build but the 99% actually use these products so it’s very important to keep them in mind when designing something. That means simplicity is key.
Something that people can use and adopt. That is where ads and external revenue come into place. Give people a place to own their content properly.
Build and monetize a community. That they will understand.
I have written about it multiple times in the past but I would hope to get some traction over time. I don’t have the skills to do it myself so I am throwing the ideas out there in the hope that they will resonate with the right people eventually.
@niallon11/why-don-t-we-like-money
FinanceLeo:
This is a team who are doing it right. They have found their niche on hive. The team have the skills to build out a separate community and they have a clear business plan to expand their offering and add value to their product through advertising and external revenue. It is no wonder that they keep growing month on month as it is easy to explain what the idea is.
Post good content. Earn Leo tokens. They earn through you sharing that content externally and they buy back the token through external revenue to pass on that value to the people creating the content. Simple plan and one that I can explain to my friends.
You will also notice that the level of content is much higher on their site than on peakd which makes it much easier to share and attracts a lot more external eyes. That is because a lot of it is designed to be seen by other people and the authors want to create professional and interesting content to draw outside views to their work. Not just within the hive echo chamber and so they produce a better standard of article. That and the moderation from the community itself leads to some very good work.
That is why I have been stacking up on the tokens as they will continue to expand on a great product and I’m sure that the team will add a lot of value to my investment over time.
Now most of my friends don’t care about finance or crypto but they can understand the principal behind this.
Make good content, attract advertising and get paid. The only real difference being that you are using hive as a medium to create that value instead of building it yourself. I remember one dev saying that they would like to see hive becoming the wordpress of crypto. This is how you achieve it.
Give people the ready built tools to monetize their content and communities without needing any technical skills and they will do it.
What do we have here?
People and content.
Who values that?
Advertisers.
From reading one of the improvement posts today, it got a response from me.
It would be great to have ads in my community and receive a portion of those profits in crypto. Hive or otherwise. We are wasting a resource by not earning ad revenue from thousands of people creating content on a daily basis. It's money gone to waste. Think of the marketing possibilities from telling people that they can create a community on hive. There will be some discreet advertising and they will receive a portion of the revenue depending on how active their community is.
That is a much easier sell to non crypto people than what we have at the moment. That is something that they can understand and an incentive to bring in more users and grow the value of the community. That could be pushed into a token or moderator account, whichever way you want to give back to those community members that are creating value for your community. It's the right way to grow a userbase and hive as well.
Turn every blogger and community into a potential business and you will see a lot more people jump into hive. Create the advertising tools to monetize their community and you will see people build. At the moment I could write a masterpiece for my community, share it to facebook and get every person in Ireland to read it and it would be worth zero as they have no hive power to upvote it. I could be drawing in millions of eyeballs for free with my dazzling wit and intellect, ( Don’t worry, I’m not) but it would all be for nothing as best case scenario, you get a few new users.
As it stands they can’t comment on these posts without signing up to hive first which draws them into keys and complications and would turn off a lot of people straight away. Guest accounts would come in handy here with a pre-existing sign in. But that’s another post.
I share my content on twitter daily as there is a crypto audience there and we might get a few users but again it is the minority. If we ever want hive to take off fully we will need to look at what the majority want and design more with that in mind.
I would love to start an Irish community on hive and reach out to people on facebook to start writing there and share ad revenue. It would be something quick and easy to explain to them. Communities could opt into ads or not and receive a share of the overall revenue. Then it is up to the admin to use them for whatever they see fit to incentivize the community, develop it or use it as payment. A successful community could become a full time job and a great reason to bring in even more people and moderate it well.
This for me would be the best kind of marketing possible. Success and a higher token price. Just look at this tweet from @paparazzi app and imagine doing a monthly announcement saying that we will be buying $100k in hive.
https://twitter.com/paparazzi_coin/status/1296845343162687488
- paparazzi_coin
If you don’t think that it would get people excited then you are wrong. That is how you get people interested in hive and looking to earn the token. I click into publishOx daily just to upvote a post and get some crypto. Why?
Because it's easy and a share of their earnings. I have a direct link set to the #hive based feed there so at least it's going to authors blogging about hive but the model makes sense. They get eyes on the content. Advertisers pay for those eyes. They give a portion back to those people viewing the content. Simple and effective and has me logging in once a day to earn.
By doing this you are creating a strong brand awareness and creating free marketing just by having a solid business plan and the ability to execute it. Most businesses struggle to get people to use their service but we have people willing to use it already and just need a way to reward that and expand upon it.
We could be doing so much more to grow and this is one hge opportunity that I would love to see followed up on going forward. Hopefully some of the witnesses or devs read this post and start thinking about a business plan to grow the token value and our userbase with one simple, "( probably not that simple to actually put in place), step of creating the tools for people to monetize their content and their community. Give people the tools to bring people in to a community and make it easier to join hive.
By doing this you would be incentivising every single community to become marketing teams and expand our userbase. You would be offering them the chance to earn from having a strong and active community without fighting over votes and creating a level playing field for authors to get rewarded based on their contributions to the community rather than the size of their autovotes. It would become about creating the most active and best moderated community rather than trying to live off scraps from the larger users. It would be more control over your earnings and bring in external money to the system.
There would need to be a system put in place to divide ad revenue between the communities and parameters to judge real activity and value of contributions but I think that it is a good direction to be looking. These could all be put in place if the powers that be were willing to push forward with creating a better space for content creation and growing the hive brand.
Lets grow hive together.