How much is a Steemit blogger currently worth?
- We know a Facebook user is worth around $140
- We know a Twitter user is worth around $83
What is the lesson here?
When you measure the value of Steemit posts in dollars instead of in Steem Power, you're empowering the dollar. The dollar flows politically, and these politics influence how much people are worth to the dollar.
In parts of the world where for poltiical reasons the value of life in dollars is deemed "cheaper', the dollar payouts on Steemit would go much further because the cost of living is less.
The anti-globalization movement objects to the obvious disparity between the value assigned to life in developed nations versus developing nations—most particularly as reflected in World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) decisions.[citation needed] They point to such numbers as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumption that a developed nation can pay fifteen times more than a developing nation to avert a death due to climate change, as evidence of systematic neglect of the value of statistical life in the poorer South, as opposed to the more developed North. Some also fear that more standard global value of life mechanisms could have consequences for the working people in the developed nations.
Steem is a social network where wealth comes from people
So you cannot avoid the fact that the market cap reflects how much the market values the wealth produced by the bloggers at any point in time. What we have to remember is when the amount of bloggers goes global, we will eventually see bloggers who can live off lower payouts while producing a very high quality of content. This is why going forward, bloggers will have to find a niche, and produce more specialized content. People in developing countries will require higher payouts because the cost of living is higher under the dollar, and by no fault of theirs, this will effect the market cap.
It is for these reasons that it's not easy to determine what a fair payout is for the whole network. Facebook in calculating each user is worth $140 is doing it based on global statistics. Including everyone in the world into the data, and this makes for a number which to an American in Silicon Valley look insultingly low, but to an African in places where $140 is 6 months living expenses? To them it would seem fair. How will we determine the answer to these questions?
Do demographics matter?
Most bloggers today on Steemit might be from developed countries where the cost of living is quite high. I'm from a country where it's impossible for a blogger to live off $140 a year and even $25,878 is considered very low. If most bloggers lived in expensive parts of the world, where the cost of living is high, but also where the value of life statistics in dollars are $50,000 a year, then you could make a case that the current payouts on Steemit actually are low.
But when you consider Steemit is global, then as the demographics of Steemit bloggers change, the perception of fairness also changes, until what seems fair today in terms of payouts will seem like over paid tomorrow. How do we avoid this moving average, when we know it will trend lower over time until it possibly reaches the levels of Facebook, of Twitter? This is the dilemma for the current Steemit blogger, to figure out how to take advantage of the fact that right now we are early adopters and in a position where we can carve out a niche. In a few years a blog post might only net $1 or even just a few cents, even with massive upvotes.
What could this mean for the Steem price?
It means the demographics could effect the price, but also politics, and perceptions of fairness, and whether or not people buy Steem Power. I simply cannot predict the price of Steem. I would say if Steemit grows to a billion users and they all try to blog, you can expect the payouts per blogger to go down, possibly to levels like $140 a year on average with a 200 billion dollar market cap like Facebook, or possibly even lower if the market cap doesn't get that high.
My opinions
In my opinion, I do not think the "value of human life" should be attached to the "value of a user" on a social network. The problem is that under capitalism, there is a concept called cost of living. This creates an environment where the products and services which sustain life have some cost in dollars, and as a result of this it is not possible to separate the harsh realities from virtual reality. The Steem token may be a virtual currency, but the Steem Dollar is pegged to the US Dollar, and the US Dollar is a political currency. The blogger on Steemit in theory would have to earn enough in Steem Dollars to pay their cost of living, and in an ideal environment every blogger on Steemit would be able to earn enough from one quality post a day, to pay whatever their local cost of living is. Unfortunately the situation is more complex than that and the purpose of my post is to illustrate the complexity, and also to highlight the unfairness in the statistics.
As a result I do not think Steem will offer the equivalent of a "basic income". It offers at best a passive income to people who work really smart and who have the talent to maintain it. The follower list in my opinion will become the lifeline income source for bloggers in the long term. At the same time, if Steemit isn't fun, if gamification isn't implemented, then why would people buy Steem Power? And if people do not do that, then people in developed countries will not make enough from posting on Steemit to quit their day jobs on average, but there is no clue what the dollar figure would be.
For these reasons, I think of Steemit as a game. It's either going to be fun to post on Steemit without any concern about what the rewards are, or there will be bickering over what is or isn't fair, and the concept of fair will differ depending on if a person lives in a developing or developed country, and based on what they deem a blogger is worth which differs from individual to individual.
References
- http://www.statista.com/statistics/289505/social-networks-value-per-active-user/
- https://steemit.com/steemit/@furion/steem-analysis-user-growth-is-a-steemit-blogger-really-worth-usd25-878
- http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-government-puts-a-dollar-value-on-life-1458911310
- http://www.livescience.com/15855-dollar-human-life.html
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140906155341-5175572-editorial-what-is-the-value-of-human-life
What is the value per user of other crypto currencies? Comparing social network value of steem to currency value is like comparing industry use of gold to monetary value.
From BItshares:
So the minimum lifetime value for Bitshares was $80 based on actual use. On the other hand Steemit is a lot easier to monetize and the use is very different so it's hard to determine what the value is. I would say it's probably more than $80 because of the lifetime value of the content they could generate but because the content could be basically anything, I can't really determine with any accuracy a lifetime value of a content producer, it could be in the millions for some and then for others not as much, and this would effect the average value.
So for Steemit to have a value per user of $25,878 does make sense when you consider the early adopters probably aren't ordinary people. Most of us have advanced degrees, very specialized skills and knowledge, and this would be reflected in our posts. Even people who post on travel topics or who post on political topics, aren't just the typical blogger. We have people here who have very unique experiences, knowledge, skills, perspectives, but over time this novelty might wear off. When the Internet first came online or even when Facebook first came online, the average user was in academia, in the ivy leagues, it didn't begin to represent the average person until a lot of people were on the platform.
So it could be that for right now the average blogger on Steemit does not represent the average blogger on the Internet. More data and statistics have to be analyzed because I'm not sure of how to interpret this yet.
Reference
https://bitshares.org/referral-program/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_distribution
Good point. If anyone can find that data it would be useful to have, but at the same time what is the usual demographic for cryptocurrency?
In my side of the earth minimum wage is about 10.77 dollars a day. So if you are from here and earning about 20 dollars a post, you can quit your job and focus on writing blogs and improve your reputaion so that you could leverage and earn more.
Exactly, and you would look at posts like mine or others where people earn $100s per post or in some cases $1000s per post and think it's a significant amount of money because in your part of the world it is. In our part of the world, a person typically would make $100 a day on minimum wage or more, so $100 a post is quite low if the posts are of high quality.
On the other hand, $1000 a post is $1000 a day, is $300,000 or so a year, and even that is just a standard amount of money if you live in Silicon Valley or San Francisco. So really it depends on where you live.
Id love to earn like you do. If i did earn just like you did. Id be a millionaire in no time. A dollar here is worth 47 pesos. That is why even my posts dont earn that much im still happy because i know for a fact that my reputation is getting better one vote at a time. Time will come more and more Filipinos will participate in this platform and by that time my account would have accumulated a strong followership. I believe in this platform. It will be big here in my country that is why im trying to convince as many people as i can to try it out. Im working on a blog to launch the first steem it billboard in metro manila with the help of @steemdrive. A month of exposure in the busy streets will surely be a big boost for steemit. Hope to get uour support when im ready to launch the blog. Thanks
Exactly, and that's why it should be fair opportunity but not equal rewards! Some bloggers, artist, entrep., sent years in school and developing there skills.
Bout a 100,000$ off but who's counting ;-) lmao. http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/08/22/Silicon-Valley-s-Average-Wage-Goes-through-Roof
Great article btw, I couldn't agree more. I think that's the coolest thing about "internet money". If you can make money online you can live anywhere, depending on how much you make. But I'd have no trouble leaving Canada if I could make a couple grand a week online.
I agree with this well put together post. I will add that the market cap isn't trying to value each user around $25,000..but instead is a prediction investors are making that Steemit could have a much larger user base in the future. My struggle is that after getting lucky on 2 posts and putting a bit towards a Steem Power investment, I'm making about 15 Steem (Power) per day in interest which is way more than I would likely make from blogging part time. For full time bloggers with lots of followers this would not be the case. I also hope Steemit figures out how to get money from the outside..such as ad revenue (though something less off putting if possible). If Facebook only had users and nothing for an external economy to feed money into and get something out of..it wouldn't have much of a market cap at all.
All bloggers are not created equal here on Steemit. I don't claim to be a blogger but I know a great one within a few minutes read. There are some great bloggers I've helped curate on this platform.
I thought this post would be about capitalizing the bloggers on steemit. If they do 4 $2000 posts day that's worth $1.5m or $750k liquid and $750k equity. That's like $7m per blogger. Seems a bit expensive for steemit but why aren't more bloggers on here.
What a great in depth post. It really got me thinking about the value of our time. Really this is where I see value in Steemit. I have accounts on many other social media platforms and I have developed social capital on both Instagram and google+ but I see my time being sucked into this vortex of websites and commenting and likes and where is it really getting me? With the idea of steemit and the idea of being compensated for the time I devote to it - it makes way more sense to focus more of that time and energy on this community.
Nice Insight into The Value Of Steem
I am Here For The positive
I get an eerie feeling the day will be coming when Steemit accounts are being sold on ebay. Saw it big time for cex.io accounts.
I also think services will pop up that advertise "pay us $20.00 and we'll give you 100 up votes" or something along those lines. And I bet the majority of the big services will come out of China. I'm a gamer girl and if any of you have played MMORPG's then you know all about the gold farmers that mostly set up shop in China. I think folks will eventually be setting up Steem shops and will open mass accounts... Hopefully the mechanics (that I don't fully understand yet) will have some sort of safeguard against something like this... fingers crossed...
Yeah, like the one's running guides and cheats on Warcraft just to get the gold to sell off.
not all bloggers here are worth 25Gs but I'm here to stay, until I can say I'm worth $25,878 :)
But you do realize those numbers are politically determined? It's not the actual worth in terms of potential, it's the politics.
Your posts are amazing and, I want to ask you if you are willing to make a different post. I challenge you to take part of this challenge
I curate about 10 SP per day. From where I am from I can buy 40 litre's of distilled water or 10W of installed Solar energy; trust me it means a lot.
My power down every week is about 11 Steem ( less than peanuts) I know. But think about it, In China they are producing 0.5$/W of Solar panels yesterday.
I bought this In one of my previous powerdowns.
All arguments mentioned above are important. Steemit currently is a good place get money, to get information and to perform yourself . The ONLY question I have - How long could this feast be?
Interesting perspective. That being said, Steemit income is anything but passive -- and I think that's by design. Any newbie here, has to hustle their face off on a daily basis before they will make anything substantial -- aside from the one hit wonder type posts.
I should up every day and so far it's worked out nicely for me. :)
Just curious, where are the sources for this data?:
Never mind, just saw your reference link (thanks for adding): http://www.statista.com/statistics/289505/social-networks-value-per-active-user/
Now you bringing out the values of steemit bloggers and you remind them their goals. Sweet.
Estimated Account Values for all of us are going down. We as bloggers should want to see that going in exactly the opposite direction. So why is it going down when the quality and quantity of content is going up?
@dana-edwards
I love your post, always very intellectually composed. I agree that the "value", whether it be SBD, steem or the USD or even gold always seems to as if every aspect is based on a "static" situation. In truth that is (imho) a fallacy and these "relative" terms need to actually be figured on an individual basis on a fixed date and time. Income and cost of living throughout the world is so varied and even the perception is radically different from person to person in the same locals.
It would be nice to see computations of value based on at the very least, major city demographics from different countries around the world as a starting point of value computation. I vote you ! as that computationalist !
I wish I were as articulate as you, and I hope you at least understand what I'm trying to say.
To me the $25k figure is by large out of line with reality. Taking a snapshot marketcap value of all the tokens and dividing it by the number of users is a gross oversimplification from a trading standpoint. First of all, the whales hold most of the steem so the average value of a single blogger calculated from this has a huge statistical skew - even the so called dolphins here are often worth less than $25k.
Second, its impossible to cash in qucikly (powerdown period) so the marketcap is calculated based on a limited number of freefloat tokens (or shares in broader context), creating an illusion of liquidity and high valuation. In reality, it takes a small fraction of trading volume to alter the price of steem signifcantly - changing this valuation from $25k to $50k in a single day isn't very difficult, and it has happened before. Does this mean that over a course of a single day the market valued the same content at twice the price by the evening compared to the morning ?
Buying into steem in my eyes has little to do with the content quality and bloggers per se. It's more to do with the concept and the potential the platform holds. And this is what requires the developer's and communitie's utmost attention right now. There will be competition for decentralized, fair publishing platforms, and it might get fierce, to the point of FB and others taking cues from platforms like Steem.
In my eyes Steem's valuation is: