Outside of Steemit, the current content economy is broken.
Content creators work hard to make awesome content, but their only way to monetize is via advertising, affiliate marketing, leading readers into a funnel, or some other way of leveraging their content to get paid.
Since there’s no way to directly monetize their hard work, the best content creators often have to rely on things that could substantially impact the partisanship and direction of the content.
However, that’s just the start of it.
Not only are the current routes for monetization potentially credibility corrupting, they’ve become less and less effective. Content consumers have proven to show a strong distaste for paying for online content. The sheer amount of content available online mixed with a general avoidance of consuming content that requires a whitelisting or venturing past a paywall.
Digital advertising, for example, has been greatly minimized by the explosive rise of ad blocking. At the end of 2016, there were roughly $615 million devices around the world blocking ads, and the percentage of people blocking ads has been consistently growing.
This is something that affects bo
th individual content creators, as well as large-scale media companies. Dozens of publications now ask you to “whitelist” them in order to read their content, and as you can imagine, is driving casual readers away in troops.
On the other end of the content exchange, the Steemit platform gives content consumers an incentive to naturally and organically engage with the content they read. People who upvote and help curate the best content on the site, as well as commenters who contribute to discussions, are all rewarded by the platform.