I've been writing for most of my life. Never published anything. Lost most of it in hard drive failures. Same thing with the digital art. During those years, it didn't make sense for me to invest money into the words or art with the hopes of getting something out of it. Ten years ago I thought Facebook might be a good start. I thought about doing something similar to what I'm doing here, on Facebook. Imagine how much of a waste of time that would have been. Sure, maybe I would have grown a following and maybe got a few likes... but likes don't buy cheeseburgers.
I hope this Steemit thing stays the way it is, with a few improvements of course. Myself and quite a few others have helped pioneer entirely new business models for artists. It's good the see the conventional approach finding their way here as well. I truly believe this concept, what were all doing here... it should help make the starving artist go extinct.
MySpace was supposed to make the starving artist go extinct - and it did for the ones who maximized on that platform - but, it died. Facebook used to make an even playing field for creatives, there was a time I was getting 3-5000 hits to my website a week and my posts were reaching 20-70K people. That's how I built my business. But, Facebook died too. When Steemit gets really popular, the reward pool will be the same, but there will be 100x as many content creators trying to get a piece of it. Eventually, SBD will drop down to $1 or less and Steemit will become much harder to eek a profit from. I'd love it if the idea of the starving artist went away but to a lot of artists, they don't feel like "real" artists unless they;re starving and suffering. SOOOOO many of my artist friends don't even take 3 minutes to look into Steemit. They're not entrepreneurs, even if you give them a platform to make free money, it's too much work for them... It's not art if they;re "just trying to make money with it" etc...