A little over a year ago, I started "steemhost" in order to create a mechanism that would reward people for reading the steem content. It entailed selling advertising and converting that to steem. Steemhost, the content producer and the reader were rewarded in steem power delegation. As it was a delegation, it couldn't be sold but it would be reflected when the participant posted their own content.
- The coding could be applied to any website so it would open the possibility of creating a competitor to Adwords.
- Everyone could sell ads
- Both the advertisers and the content providers had the ability to control the ads:
- It could specify what geographic area it would be available for;
- It could specify the content tag it could appear on (eg photography, art, travel etc.);
- It could limit the ads to appear only on specific content providers' pages.
I think there is also another aspect to this. Since this buying ad space, people could purchase advertising via credit card. It is just that steem/delegation is the underlying method of accounting for it. For instance a person could buy 1000 ads and pay for it using credit card. The internal mechanism would buy the steem at the current price and allocate it for delegation.
As far as steemhost goes, it was a success as far as it went.
I had a number of people who earned enough to trigger delegation (ie needed 1 steem worth at the time). Unfortunately, three things put a stop to my promotion of the site.
- Jump in the price of connection to DB
- Majority of hosts stopped creating content
- Pneumonia