I think one of the most promising features of steemit is the promoted section. It is a built in feature that allows people to get attention to their posts while also benefiting the entire steem ecosystem. Unfortunately, in it's current set up, it seems that it is only worth it if you want to spend $15 or more. I'm going to talk about how it currently works, the problems I see with it, and some potential solutions. Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments so that we can make this feature more powerful for everyone.
Overview: How Post Promotion works Currently
To promote a post you send at least 1 SBD to the @null account. This account is not owned by anyone and automatically removes the SBD you sent from circulation. This is known as "burning" the SBD. This lowers the amount of SBD in circulation which puts upward pressure on the value of steem. In other words, when a post in promoted, it is "payed" to everyone who owns steem because it increases the value. The more people are promoting content, the more valuable steem will get. It is in all of our best interest to make the promotion feature succeed.
In return, your post is added to the promoted section of steemit, which you can see next to the trending, new, and hot sections. The order that the posts are in is based on who burned the most SBD. So if you want to be at the top, you can go to the @null account's wallet and see how much was sent there for the top post, then simply pay more than that. Your post will remain there until you receive the payout from that post.
Vision for the Promoted Section
I see the promoted section as a way for people to get exposure to a greater range of users. This is especially useful for new posters who don't have many followers and don't have any chance of getting to the trending or hot sections.
I see it as a replacement for the voting bots that I think take value from steem. The only purpose voting bots have is to help users boost their payout amounts in hopes that they can make it to the trending and hot pages. Right now, it is almost a necessity to get exposure, but I think it has a net negative effect on the platform. Every time someone promotes a post, it adds value to steem, when someone pays a voting bot, it removes value from steem (I don't want to go into how it removes value in this post, maybe in the future)
I see it as a way for everyone to find new and interesting content that people believe in enough that they are willing to promote it.
I see it getting to the point where it is more valuable for you to promote someone else's post than to send them a direct tip.
Current Drawbacks
The biggest issue I see with the current set up is the ROI (return on investment) is too low in most cases. There seems to be a threshold where if you pay less, you won't really have any effect. Currently, that threshold is around 15 SBD. That is about what it costs you right now to get in the top 20 posts on the promoted section. Any lower and you start dropping in line fast. This means that it makes more sense to pay a voting bot to upvote your post than to use the built in promote feature which is a shame.
Another issue is that, even though I like to go to the promoted section to find posts, it is hard for me to get in the habit of going there. This is because, if you go there more than once every 2 or 3 days, you are likely to just see the same posts because they stay in the same order until they are paid out or until someone pays more than them. (There is a somewhat similar problem with the trending page, but it's not as bad and we'll save that for a future day) This is a big problem because if no one goes to the promoted section, what is the point of promoting your post?
Solutions?
I have a few potential ideas that I think could increase the value of the promoted section and thereby, increase the value of the entire platform.
Dynamic order to the promotion tab
If the promotion tab would rotate content a little more, I think that would attract more views. Instead of just putting them in the order of most paid, it could randomize it, weighting the posts by high much they were promoted for. For example, if a post was promoted with 50 SBD and another with 1 SBD, the first would be 50x more likely to show up at the top. We could possibly even use an accumulating probability algorithm. I have built a pretty good one but I won't bore you with the details in this post.
Pay per click/impression
I don't know how possible this idea is, but what if you only paid for upvotes/views/impressions. Let's say you send 10 SBD for promotion. We could somehow track when someone sees/upvotes/opens your post from the promoted section and deduct that from the SBDs you sent. When the post pays out, the @null account would see how many impressions/upvotes/views the post had, and based on how much they all cost, refund any leftover SBD. This is basically the model that online advertising uses so I figure it must work to some extent.
Promoted posts in trending/hot
This is a bit of a no brainer idea. We should mix promoted posts into the trending/hot lists. This would give more exposure to the promoted posts as well as give variety to those sections.
Promoted posts on the sides of the page
Similar to the last suggestion, we could put promoted posts on the sides of the website. This would, again, give more exposure to the promoted posts. We could probably even have an option for people to pay a small amount of SBD to remove the promoted posts.
For a great explanation and visual of these last two ideas, check out this post.
Well, that's all I've got so far. I hope it can at least get some more ideas flowing. I think this could be one of the most useful features on steemit and I would love to see it replace those annoying voting bots.
If you liked this post, be sure to upvote/resteem, I don't have many followers yet, so if you think this could be useful, please resteem so that more people can see it. Also, you can follow me for more posts on solving the problems in the world. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Thanks for reading!