The problem with that is inadequate incentives to buy a ton of STEEM, power it up and upvote people.
I disagree that is a problem in itself. A content producer usually monetizes off thousands of readers, not 10 or 20. If you get thousands of 15SP upvotes, it will be meaningul, specially when it comes at every article you write. The real problem is getting those thousands of viewers into the blockchain, which currently has no solution whatsoever, but still shouldn't be hard to resolve.
Take a few different projects for readers and partner them up to share their content consumers between themseves, offer rewards for commenting through the chain, list comments through the api but skipping blacklisted accounts (i.e. spam and bots) and offer rewards for engaging, like upvotes or lotteries. Bam.
Long winded reply... If its worth your time, maybe grab a cup of coffee first and slip on the cozy slippers first. ;)
Ideally that could work, but it won't be that way any time soon. Additionally, the more STEEM exists in the system the less valuable that 15 SP becomes for upvotes. So, yes, as the price of STEEM goes up smaller amounts of STEEM result in higher upvote value, but this also means the cost of obtaining that 15 SP is quite high.
When we look at the details, its not quite so simple. Back when STEEM was $1.10, it required about 125 SP for a $0.01 upvote, or a $137.50 investment. At $0.33 per STEEM it takes 295 SP for that same $0.01 upvote and its only for 100%, 99% is still $0.00! So, right now is a $97.35 investment for one single $0.01 upvote per day, $108.90 if you want 10 $0.01 upvotes per day.
Did 15 SP get you $0.01 upvote power when STEEM was $8.40? Maybe, I sincerely doubt it, but at $8.40 that's a $126 investment.
I ran some numbers in a word document. So, when you calculate STEEM value, inflation rate/reward pool and compare it to 3650 upvotes per person per year, you still don't get a 15 SP upvote worth $0.01 even if STEEM was worth $10. The price of STEEM would have to be around $35, assuming a 360,000,000 supply and a 7.5% inflation rate for that year. So, until STEEM gets up there in the $35+ range any account with 15 SP is just upvoting with dust.
It gets even more troublesome when you use Youtube likes as an example for what we can expect from content consumers upvoting on Steem. Assuming every member of the audience has a $0.01 upvote power, on Youtube most videos have way more views than they do likes or dislikes. This means people have a tendency not to bother supporting the content producer, often probably don't even watch the whole thing.
So, let's look at a few real-world examples. TheChartGuys just put out a video and it got over 5000 views, with around 400 likes and 4 dislikes. DataDash got a video viewed 16,700+ times and only received 718 likes.
Okay, knowing this, let's say we make a dtube vid or blog post that really hits it out of the park and gets a whopping, absolutely insane 2000 upvotes. Yay! A whole $20 bucks... It is enough to cover a bottle of hard alcohol to forget how broke you are for one night, but that ain't paying the bills.
If you're a truly famous person and get 100,000 upvotes each time, okay, that works out for you. In that scenario with a $35+ STEEM and a 100,000 fanbase of 15 SP upvoters works. Still, on-boarding new fans should be tough, given that it now costs $525 for a $0.01 upvote power.
You lost me somewhere. It looks like we're on different conversation topics. I've been talking about unexplored business models and how they can take a completely different approach using the blockchain by mixing onchain with offchain elements, while you've been talking about... The things already in the original post? I'm not sure.
15 SP is for commenting. Is 15 too much? Too little? It's just a number. It could be just a delegation, or it could be powered by ads... As long as the revenue model covers it, it doesn't matter.