This model of promotion is a joke. There are only a handful of top slots and if thousands of people tried to promote their posts in this fashion, all they do is end up blending back in with the crowd; making this more pointless than it ever was. The business model is one big flop. If it becomes successful it becomes useless at the same time. That's not capitalism, it's stupidity.
Content producers come first. The ads and promoted posts should be tucked nicely inside posts as banner ads. That would give those who wish to promote their posts a much larger potential viewership, and the content producers would be able to produce content that can reach top slots organically. There are literally thousands of posts published daily. The ads should be inside those posts and the content producers should take center stage to attract eyes to the platform.
The content producers should have to select a maximum of two ads they'd like to include in their blog from a market. In other words, content producers would curate ads and look for something people might want to click because the content producer would be earning a piece of the ad revenue. That click should function like the vote button, voting for the post before the consumer takes off to visit the ad. Those promoting would have to spend more and more to jockey for position within this market tab. If they wanted the top slot there, with the hopes a lazy blogger wouldn't look hard, they'd have to buy STEEM and spend more to boost it to the top. This creates a huge demand for STEEM this current model can't even come close to.
That promotion, on payday, then gets split between the promoters, content producers who hosted the ad, and if there's any profit left that goes to the one who published the promotion.
Everyone then works together. Content producers can earn ad revenue on top of their votes, those promoting have far more potential slots and far more potential eyes on their ads, those selling votes for the ads within the market would earn less per post but far more in bulk. There wouldn't even be enough of them, which creates more demand to buy STEEM on top of all this. Content producers with more stake earn higher percentages of the ad reward pool, creating even more demand to buy steem and power up earnings.
Right now everyone works against each other and the promotion system is a joke. These people could be making far more money but they don't have any experience in the entertainment industry to be able to understand their roles. They want the most money and they currently depend on the next sucker who walks in the door. Everything about their system means, eventually, it falls in on itself.
you have made such valid points here my friend. shit if we could find a developer alone this comment could be turned into the basis for a whitepaper.
Steemit will likely never change like that but it takes smart folks like you who have thought so deeply on the issue to drive us in a positive direction for growth elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure I said this creates demand for STEEM.
The root cause of the whole vote selling issue was STEEM's linear reward curve which made vote value predictable. Essentially turning votes and rshares commodity which can be sold as a service.
One way to destroy this whole market is to change the reward curve and making it impossible to know how much one's vote is worth exactly. @kevingwong detailed how this could be done in his post some time ago and it's something i recommend anyone and everyone to read.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kevinwong/are-you-seeing-the-truth-what-is-your-vision-of-steem
Now that @kevinwong is a witness on Steem, i'm confident enough that when he has what it takes to make a real change to the way Steem works when he has enough influence. If you haven't voted for him, you should!
That's such an interesting concept. I wonder how it would play out.