I'm curious what this implies for the future demographic of Steemit users. It's exciting to think about all of the cultural sharing that has and will take place on here. If Steemit becomes flooded with users lucky enough to have internet access in 3rd world countries, will that bring down the average earnings of all other users (supply and demand essentially) or will something else occur? Right now the big $$ is attracting a lot of attention. Attention is great, but long term, lower rewards should be expected. Unless.. advertisers end up really using Steemit to promote and share their ideas and products. "Where's the money coming from"? Currently it's propped up by investors like myself but eventually an outside source like advertisers (either accounts or actual advertisements) will be required.
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In terms of advertising money, the platform is already being monetized through the search function it has - basically a custom Google search engine, which displays ads among the hits you get for your search. The other mechanism as you mentioned is the promoted tab, which can be used.
In the scenario where monetization would only occur through advertising, then the traffic to the website would have to dramatically grow in order to "justify" the current "earnings". Especially since the basic advertising models are not administered throughout the whole website, but only in parts of it - meaning the amount of monetized Page Views is not equal to total Page Views.
In terms of the existing models that are used as the industry standard today, CPM incomes generated through Google Adsense are widely said to be about 1$ on average. Meaning 1,000 impressions or views of an advert, will amount to 1$ of revenue for the website the ad appeared on. There's of course revenue that Google keeps for itself, so the advertiser paid more than 1$ in this case.
Anyway, if we were to transfer this to individual posts on Steemit, we would see that the compensation for generating content, that is in turn monetized through a CPM model, can be astronomically high for active posts (ones that can still be monetized and if I'm not mistaken those are the ones that are max 7 days old - correct me if I'm wrong, I've only been on this platform for 4 days and might not have everything figured out of course).
Since this post of mine currently stands at 6.41$ and has 18 views/impressions (not sure if it counts unique visitors or total views, which is important) its compensation in terms of CPM is at a massive 356$. Now, I feel comfortable in saying no website is generating such an advertising income based on 1,000 page views and thus based on the existing advertising models this piece of content I published is currently grossly overpriced :)
But since I will no longer receive any direct rewards for it in the future, its views can keep going up and up and thus its relative compensation down and down. Looking at some of the articles I wrote on my other websites, some have a total of about 200,000 impressions. If I were to publish that and in the span of one or two years it got the same number of views, while I would be directly compensated to the amount of 6.41$, the CPM would stand at 0.032$, which would be grossly underpaid in comparison to what I could have earned on my own website.
This highlights a potential problem with not rewarding content on the value to the platform it generates in the long run through search traffic.
Damn, I actually came up with my next post idea writing this comment :D