This would make sense if two things happen:
- The poster or content creator gets a reward for page views after the initial payout.
- The poster or content creator can be easily tipped for providing great content free of charge.
As it sits right now, there is no long tail except for free hosting in the blockchain.
I think either of those would potentially open up more of the long tail but I do think there is a long tail that is viable purely with the initial payout that is not viable any other way right now. This post would even be an example, were this some other interesting cryptocurrency project I was thinking about I probably wouldn't make the effort to clarify it in my head and write it out without the incentive Steem provides.
I would also argue that even given only an initial payout which may not be ideal, the alterative options for unposted content right now are generally zero chance of any payout.
Having said that it would make a lot of sense for both 1 and/or 2 to happen. If we took an existing social media site as an example, like Facebook, the site could even be ad supported, then the revenue from those ads used to buy Steem that were then distributed as Steem power based either on the number of views or some other measure.
The alternatives are blogs and advertising, both of which have ongoing costs and maintenance requirements. I agree this p2p decentralized solution is much better for hosting and discussion, as it removes the control and censorship that depending on advertising brings with it.
I have to agree, unposted content does not generally get a payout. :)
Either way this is an exciting distributed platform and I cannot wait to see how people use it, whether that is revenue based or not.
I should have been made it more clear but what I meant what that the potential for unposted content if posted is generally zero.
Blogs and advertising have ongoing costs and maintenance requirements but they also have a critical mass and discoverability problem.
Any new blog that doesn't get regular content or has only a small amount of content (for example think of a blog with only one page but where the page is interesting) won't get indexed and ranked well which means even if the content is good it will probably never get seen and hence be worth zero even with advertising.
As a comparison, if you posted a Bitcoin article to the Bitcoin subreddit vs to a random blog where you did no significant additional work to promote it the same work would do a lot better in the subreddit where people interested in that area were already gathering.
But you can't put ads on your Reddit content and Reddit also don't like people just posting links to their own blogs, particularly if you don't post much or anything else.