RE: 1st Time | Invested in Steem

Thanks for the tip for Steemify. I'll check it out.

What is @steem worth? Hmmmm.... Well it is somewhere between what the value of an Internet domain that has a blog that no one reads or consumes it's media, or Facebook. The fact that Facebook can be measured in value because it can monetize itself through advertising revenue means that they can just track that revenue and correlate it with the number of new signups, etc. (potential audience size). From that, you can forward project value and the market comes to some consensus of value.

This is the key - two factors: 1. Adoption rate and 2. Monetization value. If this platform is just a market for upvote clickies, then I see this as worth nothing more than a stupid little Internet video game. If this platform, however, has valuable content that can take someone's attention from CNN or a Sitcom on TV, and get them to spend 30 minutes a day scouring through great content, then it is worth billions.

So my speculation on this comes down to content quality. If the quality isn't focused on what is of interest to the reader, watcher, listener, etc. then this is a failed experiment and with it your $ investment will go down the drain. But there are a number of things going for this platform - mainly that the blockchain is immutable. So if YouTube keeps de-monetizing or shadow banning video content that they don't agree with, those publishing said content will come here (or somewhere else like BitTube to publish). That will bring the subscribers with it. But if they don't choose any Steem based platform because the content quality is a joke, then they won't want to be associated with this and they will find another place.

We all play a role in increasing the value here by creating great content - not treating this like some video game where upvoting using some trickery makes you money. That might work in the short term, but it is not an "investment". That is a game, and typically you spend 10x the effort to get a return there. Investors invest in something that doesn't require a lot of human effort to get the return. At least the smart ones do.

I am willing to speculate with this platform until it proves to be pointless. I'm not sure (in the year or so I've been here) whether it has gotten better or worse. I'll make that determination in 12 months or so, and either pull my activity off of here and move it elsewhere, or ramp up as I see more audience numbers increasing.