Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate the support. I posted this a few days ago and didn't get much traction at all. So votes from you and @jerrybanfield really means a lot to me.
To address some of the issues from the comments, mostly regarding the negatives of advertising. I completely agree and understand where you guys are coming from and as I mentioned, I'm trying to create a new type of marketing product for Steem that works with the community. I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what that will look like yet but I'm hoping I can help brands to create real engaging content on platform. It should be a win-win for both the brand and the community.
Also I'm being very selective with who I'm targeting for sales, so strictly enterprise fortune 500 companies. Because of the way that Steemit and other Steem apps are structured, there's not actually a lot of room for a ton of ad buyers in the traditional sense. I estimate it's probably not even capable at servicing half a dozen large clients. I think Steemit need to add better notification, ability to follow tags etc to really enable more targeting to support more customers.
Additionally, I'm sure it's a lot easier to sell marketing services to ICO companies right now but I'll avoid that completely as I don't think it proves much and won't helps the price of Steem or the community.
I want to stress that I'll only be going after a handful of suitable large clients with very hand on sales cycles.
I want companies to promote real engaging posts that they already are creating through their existing campaigns. For example, I met with Google's Firebase dev team for Pushtable.com, I would love Google to promote a video series on d.tube to teach serverless development with Firebase's new hosting feature etc. Maybe Microsoft could do a tour of their office and promote some recruitment content etc. I think ultimately ads should as close to real content as possible. We are just so used to shitty ads that we instantly have negative emotions about anything related to ads / marketing, but as I mentioned I think Steem can change this.
@yabapmatt, Thanks for the PM I'll follow up with you guys in the chat rooms.
Wow! So amazed to see this direction, definitely this is the direction community should think and evolve. This will open up so many possibilities and future growth in wast number of opportunities.
I am with you and definitely help in getting word out.