RE: Poll: Would You Like if Steemit Sold Advertising and Shared the Revenue with Us?
An interesting idea, on the one hand I like money and the idea of being paid just for being a member is pretty cool. Not to mention more money for Steem would hopefully result in more and faster development.
But at the same time, I think selling advertisements on the platform disincentivizes people from creating content, and shifts the financial reward engine to one that is focused on account ownership and gaining rep through any means necessary. I recently read the Steem white paper and a lot of what Steem is based on is the idea that users will police each other. The platform is not invulnerable to manipulation and abuse, but the hope is that since everyone is getting paid to not only create and curate content that is valuable to the community, but they are also getting paid based on their contributions weighted against everyone else's. Accounts that are abusing the system will get weeded out by the users who have an incentive to increase their reward percentage by exposing abusive accounts that take at least the minimum SP to comment amount out of the system just by existing. These accounts could pretty easily increase their power through boosters, which would be paid back pretty quickly through the increased rewards generated by ad sharing.
Additionally, it would feel like Steemit would be "double dipping" if they were getting paid not only to run the service, but also by selling their users information (which is essentially the same as users paying to use a service, users are just paying with their information rather than their money). Most services that sell ads as their primary source of income do so because they are a free to use platform. While Steemit is a free to use platform, there is already a percentage of the Steemit reward pool that is taken out for distribution to the developers. While again this is not directly requiring users to pay for the service, it really is since the percentage that is taken out is money that would have been distributed among the community otherwise. If Steemit were profiting off of ads, they would be requiring their users to pay them by giving up a percentage potentially rewards pool, as well as to pay them by selling their information. If that were the case, I think it would really detract from the value of Steemit and depreciate the value of this awesome community.
For those reasons I stated above I would be against Steemit selling ads on their platform, even if they shared the profits with the community.
Great question, it prompted some good thinking and discussion among the community. Thank you for asking it. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the community thinks!
This is a great response darnuss06. You make some great points here. Here is my question: yes I understand that even harmless banner ads may involve some kind of "selling of information," but is that always the case? I remember the days when banner ads were not re-targeted ads, but just simply dumb ads that were essentially billboards on websites. Don't those still exist in some form? I know that when I go to the Nytimes website, I see ads that were clearly targeted (hence, my info was collected and sold), but I also see a few ads that almost certainly were not re-targeted (or at least I don't think they were). For example, from time to time I will see ads on the nytimes website that are for luxury women's apparel...clearly not for me. So that said, is it really double dipping if they are non-targeted ads? Second, my limited understanding of digital advertising is that the collection of MOST of the data is actually happening on OTHER sites. So for example, I google "travel to Hawaii," and the next day when I go to Nytimes, I see an ad for "Hawaiian Airlines." In this case, it wasn't the Nytimes that collected and sold my info. So is it possible to still do banner ads without collecting/selling information on users? Or are those times gone?
I think banner ads like the ones you are describing would be acceptable, I could definitely envision different Steem apps, crypto related products/games/etc, or even just users with large followings being interested in paying for some banner ads on Steemit. If I saw ads like those on Steemit I would think twice about it, they would be unobtrusive and entirely what one would expect when using a social media like Steemit.
I would still worry about how that would look to users. Unfortunately in this day and age optics are often more important than facts. A user will probably form an immediate opinion on banner ads when the see them, and that opinion will be hard to change even if that users takes the time to understand what information an advertiser may or may not have about you. I could see that affecting the way Steemit is perceived as a platform, especially where crypto is involved since people involved in crypto are often likely to be concerned with privacy than on a user on a traditional media site.
In summary, I would not have a problem with banner ads or sidebar ads, I could even see them enriching the platform, both literally through adding to the reward pool, and figuratively through providing users and Steemit apps a place to broadcast their products to the community. I would still be worried about how the presence of ads would effect the perception of Steemit as a platform and would probably still lean towards remaining ad free, but I also would not be disappointed to see ads on the platform because of the potential value they could add.