Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
No, the concept of valuable content here on Hive and layer-2 communities such as leofinance.io is NOT subjective.
I’m seeing a worrying theory being accepted as fact here on Hive.
I want to make it clear that the concept of valuable content is NOT subjective.
In this post, I take a look at the role content plays for the value of HIVE crypto, as well as the plethora of layer-2 community tokens such as LEO.
What role does content play for the value of HIVE?
Let’s start by talking about HIVE.
As the governance token for our decentralised Hive network, HIVE itself is different.
With stake being required to conduct permissionless transactions, HIVE will always see demand.
Deriving value from decentralisation, a far and wide token distribution is all that matters.
Thus the blockchain itself smartly incentivises high volume, low quality content to keep the distribution of inflation flowing.
It doesn’t matter what content is churned out, just that something new is always there.
To the blockchain itself and thus for the value of the HIVE token, there is no difference in publishing 10 blank pages per day to a 5000 word, SEO structured evergreen blog post.
Hive itself doesn’t monetise content and thus doesn’t care about quality or its ability to make money.
But with the ability to monetise content on the Hive blockchain via Hive’s tokenised layer-2 system, this is where you should be incentivising the latter.
What role does content play for the value of Hive layer-2 tokens like LEO?
As I said at the top of this post, the concept of valuable content is NOT subjective.
Content either makes money for the publisher, which in this case is the community owner who is in control of the domain publishing the content, or it doesn’t.
The idea of layer-2 tokens community tokens is that the community owner can use them to pay users for valuable content, which they monetise by driving traffic to and selling ad space around.
While it may be okay for HIVE itself if you churned out 10 blank pages a day, community owners are not going to be able to drive any traffic to this sort of content.
Hence incentivising readable content with the highest chance of driving ongoing traffic is the smart choice.
The reality is however, that not a single Hive community monetises their content in any way shape or form.
They all create tokens and then use ongoing inflation to pay users for content…
…but they don’t actually monetise the content they’re paying for and as such never drive any value back into the token.
What we end up with is endless printing of tokens to pay for worthless content and no reason for new investors to buy the endless supply that will be inevitably dumped.
If your community is paying you for content by printing a token, but doesn’t monetise that content, then I’m sorry.
Your token is going to zero.
Should you buy LEO?
So is LEO any different from the rest of Hive’s layer-2 tokens and therefore should you buy it?
Short answer is right now no, LEO is no different.
But to provide some hope, I’m writing this from the perspective of a LEO investor who is trusting that Khal is actually monetising leofinance.io content via ads and safely storing that revenue.
Revenue that he promises will be used to buy/burn LEO.
Personally, I do trust that this is the case.
And am therefore speculatively investing in LEO now, for when this becomes reality.
Whether you should buy LEO or not comes down to whether you trust Khal is keeping the revenue he’s generating via ads served to readers on leofinance.io content.
And that this revenue will eventually be used to close the right now completely unbalanced inflation supply/demand loop, by buying/burning LEO off the market.
If you don’t want to trust this is the case, then dump all your LEO tokens and stop reading here.
While you’re at it, it might be best to go and dump the rest of your layer-2 community token dogshit who in many cases are even paying people to publish evergreen content on leofinance.io with their own token.
Yep, mind blowing.
What role do LEO investors play in driving value to the token?
While community owners, in LEO’s case Khal, have full say over monetising their community’s content on the domain, investors do have a say over the distribution of further inflation.
As such, those with stake have a massive responsibility when it comes to incentivising other members of the community to create the type of content that is valuable via curation.
Your goal?
Driving maximum traffic, generating maximum ad revenue and the highest number of LEO tokens bought back/burnt as a result.
Therefore helping the price of the token you’re invested in go up.
Literally the only thing that matters when it comes to content from a layer-2 perspective.
So now tell me this.
Why on earth would you as a LEO investor with stake - including Khal’s massive accounts using funds from the pLEO, bLEO and wLEO bridge contracts… but hey, that’s a whole other kettle of fish - continue to incentivise content that doesn’t make your investment more valuable?
Not only that, but in the case of upvoting content published from other front-ends, actively detracts value from that investment.
I just don’t get it.
Stop incentivising content that doesn’t drive revenue.
The only way to change people’s behaviour is to incentivise it.
As LEO investors charged with distribution, you are in control of this process.
What type of content makes money and therefore is valuable for LEO?
In the end, it all comes down to this for LEO investors wanting to incentivise the type of content that will increase the value of their investment.
Remember that right now the only way that LEO can generate ad revenue to be used to buy/burn tokens dumped on the market, is via ads on the leofinance.io domain.
That means that any content being published or shared using a link to any other domain, yes even other Hive domains, have zero value to LEO.
As such, those with LEO stake curating it is akin to McDonalds managers paying people to work for KFC.
Consider how many page views and therefore ad revenue, is going to be generated from a piece of content?
We’re in a tiny Hive bubble so even though a post might be getting 50 comments from those of us already in the community, in the grand scheme of things this isn’t enough to move the needle.
We need to look outside the bubble.
Does the person you’re upvoting have an external social following that they’re driving back to leofinance.io via that piece of content?
From my time here, I think it's safe to say we have a grand total of zero users with a Twitter/FB/email following big enough to make an impact.
So what is the type of content that will generate the most ad revenue and therefore is most valuable for LEO?
Well structured, evergreen pieces of content that rank on Google.
The domain’s SimpleAnalytics page clearly showed that Google traffic outpaced even the second most popular referrer 10 to 1.
It’s all that matters and should be all those of you with stake, incentivise via your upvotes.
For both of our sake.
Furthermore, keep in mind that copy/pasted content from other blogs such as personal domains and Publish0x blogs will see their versions indexed above the leofinance.io version and therefore are as detrimental as content published via other Hive domains.
You’re paying them in LEO to generate ad revenue elsewhere.
Don’t do it.
Final thoughts on the concept of valuable content on Hive and LeoFinance.
The bottom line is that LEO investors need to incentivise the type of behaviour that is good for your investment.
By doing so, you will quickly see people stop posting worthless garbage because they will no longer make money doing so.
As a fellow LEO investor, I'd highly encourage you to join me in changing your curation behaviour with this in mind.
Best of probabilities to you.
PS. Yes, I fully see the irony of this post earning LEO upvotes.
Do with it what you please.