Crazy how it all turned out.
Ever since the rollout of ad-revenue sharing, a lot of fuss has been made about this feature on the LEO ecosystem. It's kind of funny because if Khal had just plopped ads on the site and took 100% of everything for himself (a valid business model) than people would have actually complained less, somehow.
This is a weirdly objective truth not even open for debate. You put ads on the site. You don't really need anyone's permission to do it. You don't really talk about it. And then after all that the ad revenue pays for less than one dev's salary. #winning
I guess people hate sharing?
Everyone wants to know how they can spend the least amount of effort to exploit this new revenue stream for the maximum amount of gain. And then when they get their answer (or non-answer as the case my be) they're mad about it. It's very much a Shaking-My-Head moment across the board at this point. And I'm not talking about users outside of LEO ecosystem I'm talking those with some pretty sizeable stacks.
But perhaps this is just business as usual in crypto when it comes to deciding who gets what and other forms of distribution. People lose their damn minds. I'd like to say I'm the exception but that's really only half true if I'm being honest. I'll never forget the time I downvoted a comment for a penny in 2019 and the "victim" lost his shit over it. Like bro that was going to get dusted anyway.
Only one man would dare give me raspberry!
So what's the deal?
I joined the LEO AMA yesterday and learned a little bit more of what this is all about. The best source of information is definitely going to be the Simple Analytics website that tells us where all the pageviews are going.
https://simpleanalytics.com/inleo.io
Using this information we can see that at this moment in time over 99% of the ad-revenue rewards are being distributed to stakeholders and not content creators. Why? Content creators aren't generating any views for the site. The top 10 slots are completely void of content creators. Seeing as #10 only has 1800 views even that is only a few dollars of revenue. It's safe to say that even getting a $1 payout from evergreen rewards would have been at the tippy top of the curve.
In fact even my $50 stakeholder payout on Jan 18th seems suspiciously high given this analytics data. At this point I have to assume that next month will be a lot lower and that this $50 I earned includes back-payments over multiple months of ad-revenue generation. If the site gets 200k views a month and one view pays out like a tenth of a cent that's only $200 a month total in ad revenue generated.
That being said both of those numbers are extremely conservative because views ramp up to 12k a day on Jan 11th and have slowly increased to 18k a day over the last few weeks. In addition, a tenth of a cent for a view is also lowballing.
So if your article gets 1,000 views in a month, then you will receive 80% of the ad revenue that those 1000 views generates. Right now that's roughly on the order of $1.4 to $3.5 (it fluctuates based on the ad revenue we get paid by google).
Khal is telling us in the docs that at a minimum we should be generating $1.75 per 1000 views, which is $0.00175 per view. If we get a little bit more liberal with the numbers we can round up to 2 tenths of a cent per view, which is twice as much as I said just a moment ago.
Therefore, using more liberal numbers, we can target something a little higher. Say 20k pageviews a day at $0.002 per view, otherwise known as $1200 total ad revenue per month for the entire site. Given my absurd LEO stack my minimum cut of that would be at least $20, but will be several multiples higher than that when factoring in how much stake is actually powered up and how much of that powered up stake actually qualifies for revenue sharing. So it is indeed quite possible that I keep making $50 a month or more pretty much for "free" on top of everything else. You know, assuming LEO doesn't crash to zero :D
Although now that I think about it: even if LEO crashed to zero I'd still be earning the $50 because the $50 is denominated in USD from Google Adsense. The only way I don't get the payout is if my LEO stake gets diluted/sold or if InLEO stops getting views. There's some interesting game theory there in terms of floor price. Maybe some other time.
But what about actual content creators?
If we hit the down arrow on Simple Analytics and scroll a bit we can find actual blog posts that are being paid evergreen rewards from the new protocol.
It's pretty easy to divine from this data that only a couple dollars were actually distributed to evergreen content creators. That's the name of the game when it comes to actual blogging. It's very difficult to get that much needed attention within the attention economy. For the most part Hive users are pretty spoiled in this regard. Our incentives tend to be introverted and inward facing.
How did I find Steemit back in 2017?
All that being said, the only reason I'm here today is because searching Google for crypto questions brought me to this network over and over and over again. I didn't even realize the site I was looking at was a crypto site until like the 5th visit. So even back then this community was creating content that people from the outside wanted to find that wasn't posted anywhere else.
How does @edicted measure up for evergreen rewards?
Well as of yesterday my top performing post was written 2 years ago and explained the AMM exchange equation of x*y=k. Interestingly enough if I search Google for it I come up at the tippy top of the list.
However this search is a little misleading because Google knows my account is affiliated with Hive and LEO, and thus it puts Hive and LEO posts closer to the top. I asked a few other people to do the same search while also doing the same search within a browser I don't use (Microsoft Edge). The results came back a little mixed but this post on AMM showed up in the list between rank #4 and rank #7, which is still pretty good.
Revisiting this post
I can tell you write right now that I remember this post being a lot better than it actually is. It's like reading code you wrote two years ago; it made perfect sense back then but when you go back and look at it you're like, "What the actual fuck was I thinking?"
If I was going to rewrite this post for SEO I'd change a couple of different things. The first one is obvious: don't mention Hive/HBD/LEO as the primary example. That's just dumb. What if some Bitcoin maximalist wants to know more about AMM? Are they going to read some article with an example that gives two 'shitcoins'? Of course not! The lowest common denominator is OBVIOUSLY Bitcoin/USDT, and even that can be further reduced to BTC/USD. I see that now. In fact, I technically didn't even have to mention crypto at all except within the context of yield and proper incentives, but that would be overkill.
My AMA question to Khal
I'm a top blogger on this platform and my top post has 50 views.
Will you lower the pageview requirement if everyone continues to be dusted?
The answer to this question was, unexpectedly: 'no".
And I really only asked it as a technicality, as this was exactly what I expected to hear. It turns out Khal already reduced the cutoff from 1000 pageviews to 200, so we are already scraping the bottom on the dust limit. Also, why would anyone complain about this?
Say your post gets 50 views in a month.
Are you really going to complain that your 10 cent payout got dusted?
Seriously it's 10 cents.
Get over it.
And yet that's exactly the type of attitude we are seeing right now.
Instead of an opportunity it's being interpreted as an insult.
Very strange behavior.
There are only a couple people around here who have focused on the importance of SEO. The two that I know of are @forexbrokr and @l337m45732. So it is nice to see that @forexbrokr got to the top of the pageview list with a post that is multiple years old. Unfortunately a lot of his posts are about, you guessed it, forex trading. Which, as it turns out, isn't exactly that mainstream of a topic.
The point here is that if we want to get outside attention then we have to actually blog about things that the general population wants to hear. Not only that, but the post can't go stale and actually has to have value that goes up over time rather than down.
@edicted/google-search-engine-optimization-experiment
I wrote this post three years ago that was generating some traffic and a couple different LEO users told me I should make edits to improve the SEO. Clearly that didn't work too well because this post isn't even in my rankings. So why is this post no longer getting traffic? Is it because the TV show Startup lost its edge and people stopped caring about it? Is it because the bear market crushed everyone's crypto dreams? Is it because LEO is a little-known platform that just rebranded? Is it because my SEO wasn't that great to begin with? Probably a little of everything really.
Ad rewards are pure profit.
If I was earning significant evergreen rewards from this revenue sharing program... I would not have to worry about dumping on the community. On Hive and LEO if I write a post and get a lot of upvotes and then I sell... well then I'm leeching value from the network and diluting everyone's stake. However with ad revenue the money comes from the advertisers, so all of a sudden that's not something I have to worry about. I'll spend Google's money all day; who cares?
The problem with this situation is that it would drastically limit which topics I could blog about. Every subject would have to be intelligently filtered through a lens of mainstream consumption. So I'd have to ask myself: which topics do I want to write about that will also resonate with the general population?
The answer is gaming.
I could turn my blog into a video game blog, and that would probably get me the most outside views compared to any other topic I could think of. Unfortunately again I wouldn't even be able to blog about the games that I like; I'd have to blog about the games that other people like; the popular ones. Which means I'd have to start playing WOW again or a first-person-shooter or a game that launched recently that had a lot of hype (like Balder's Gate 3, a game I have never played).
The double-edged sword of this decision.
The definitive consensus on Hive is that my followers don't like it when I post about games. I get way less upvotes and engagement. So while it might be better for evergreen rewards it would be pretty terrible for the 7-day payout. The best strategy would likely to be sprinkling good SEO posts in once and a while without trying to do a full rebrand.
Topics that age like a fine wine.
I'm also seriously reconsidering rewriting a few posts that could perform well down the road. For example: we all know that crypto is going to go mainstream and is extremely complicated. Nobody understands simple concepts like Bitcoin mining. I could write an explain-it-like-I'm-five Bitcoin mining post with good SEO that won't get views until the bull market and beyond. These are the types of things we should be thinking about if we want to get views from Google and whatnot. Hell it might even be a good idea to write stuff on a mainstream blogging platform like Medium if only to link it back to Hive and LEO. Not sure how that would work or if it's a good idea just spitballing here.
Conclusion
Go take a look at the posts earning evergreen rewards. There's nothing special about them. Anyone could write a post like that, and there is a common theme between all of them. Evergreen posts do not exist within the echo-chamber of Hive. Unsurprisingly they branch out beyond that and are of interest to a much wider audience.
We should consider this entire thing to be an experiment,
and not necessarily a good one or a successful one either.
No matter how it turns out we will learn something from it.