Still seeing lots of panic about the Steem Price. It's hovering around 10c this week, but is that really so bad? BTW I don't know if this site is the most accurate. Steem Whales is showing 12c.
Okay, if you bought loads of Steem when the price was much higher then you may be making a loss, but I'm assuming you've powered that up, so you can't get it all back for two years. A lot could happen in that time. The whole thing was designed to discourage price speculation.
In my opinion Steem has been massively over-valued in the past. Posts were earning many thousands of dollars when only being seen by a few thousand people, at most. I don't have actual figures, but I expect you need many millions of views to make the same money on services that rely on advertising, e.g. Youtube. I know that's a different business model, but 'the market' finds the right level for prices and Steem/Steemit seemed to be on a different planet.
Even now I have posts that make over $10 and I think that's pretty good for someone who is just an enthusiast. It's far more than I could make anywhere else. The top people may be making a few hundred dollars per day, and that's reasonable for a few blog posts. I know some people were talking about going full time on Steemit a while back. Some may be able to pay the rent, but most will make beer money.
Time will tell if this model is sustainable. The open and distributed nature of Steemit means it doesn't depend on investors to keep the lights on. The Steemit site will have hosting fees, but the content can be shown anywhere and the blockchain will keep going as long as the witnesses are happy to process it. The site is still labelled as a beta and it does need some development before it's ready for the next wave of users who are not so technical. In another six months I expect it to be transformed and then it may be ready for millions of users. When that happens Steem will become a more valuable commodity. The price should rise, but the number of users should mean it will be spread thinner.
I'm no expert on SEO or economics, but I still think Steemit has great potential. My Steem is all powered up and I expect that to be a good investment.
Update: As of Saturday morning the price has more than doubled to 0.229! There has been some news of possible changes to Steem distribution, but we'll see how this pans out in the long term
