After experimenting with spending SBDs on promoting a post that had already received significant upvotes and payout hrough organic voting - I have found the system can be greatly improved. I used STEEMVIZ to find how much to pay to get a promoted post onto the 1st page of the Promoted section and got my post to appear on the first page there.
I found that in the few hours after I made the payment, the post received only 3 votes on top of the 70 it had already received organically and the reward level has maybe risen close to $1 as a result. I appreciate that the outcome of promoting a post is not guaranteed, but generally I do not feel that the significant cost of reaching the 1st page of the promoted section is justifiable, given the results seen and exposure gained.
Low Visibility Promotion
The promoted posts are currently shown only on their own page/tab in Steemit and I imagine that many people are not really so interested in opting to voluntarily view paid/promoted posts. Maybe we are just cynical after using Facebook, but generally there is an idea that if something is being promoted with money, it might be less valuable than something that isn't being promoted. Additionally, users might expect that great posts will make their way to the hot/trending lists anyway - so why look at the promoted posts?
Benefits of Improving The Visibility and Viability of Promoted Posts
I suggest that the effectiveness of the promoted posts would be greatly increased if they were integrated into the other pages of the site, where more people are going to see them. This can be done in an unobtrusive way and since they are posts that viewers can earn curation from, can downvote and can mute - they are not really going to annoy anyone any more than any other post - in my opinion.
Mitigation of Paid Upvote Bot Use
Optimal use/placement of the promoted posts will reduce the attraction of upvote bots and bring the system closer to it's intended design where payouts are given to the posters of quality content and not to bot operators who could be said to be 'gaming the system'. The ability to buy upvotes also means the ability to buy reputation, which is completely contrary to the entire design principle behind the reputation system.
Increased Income For the Steemit/Steem System
Presently, the Steem Eco-System is a bit intimidating to newcomers and not easily accessible to non-technical PR companies - hence they do not use it much (overtly) to advertise yet. While this is itself a good thing from the perspective of community building among real people - it is a lost opportunity to increase the value of Steem both as a currency and as a competing social network in the wider world.
Through improving the promotion system in relatively simple ways, the motivation to Power Up by advertisers will be huge and Steemit/Steem can then truly become 'the world's advertising platform' as (I believe) @ned described it.
Suggested Changes
- Insert Promoted posts at a fixed rate within post feeds - while subtly identifying that they are promoted posts using CSS styling borders or other accents. The idea is the emphasise the posts without them being annoying or overpowering. Posts can be targeted by keyword, so that only promoted posts that are relevant to the current context in the site are displayed.
- Insert a small number of promoted posts at strategic places when viewing full blog posts. When the screen is wide enough they can appear to one side of the blog text and when the screen is narrow they can appear at the very bottom of the page. The idea is that they are visible, but not annoying and so do not interfere with the use of the site as it is currently.
A suggested layout is below:
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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors