Awesome post @initforthemoney!
I would love to share my experience since I’m one of those users that posted a few times and then my enthusiasm died quickly.
First of all, let me state that I didn’t join for a quick gain. I’m a freelance journalist and Steemit sounded like a dream come true: a way to surplus my income by directly sharing quality content with an audience. As you all know, newspapers are struggling big time at the moment with going digital. The number of subscribers have plummeted (and as a consequence the number of employed journalists and rates for freelancers as well).
Of course I didn’t expect to become an overnight success on Steemit. So I made quality original content. Usually I spend 16 hours or more writing one article.
Fairly fast I noticed that an article could earn 40 dollars with only 38 upvotes, or less than 2 dollars with 165 upvotes. It really matters who likes your post.
To get more upvotes I joined Minnowsupport, PAL, Steemfollower, asked others to send my articles in for curation, and joined upvote for upvote initiatives. This resulted in 4 times the number of upvotes, but only 1.3% of the earnings!
It all comes down to the whales or dolphins upvoting your post: that is the only difference I could detect between my posts (please correct me if I’m wrong). In the end, there is only a limited amount of steem (steem power, dollars etc) to divide each day. 90% goes to the miners, 10% to the content creators upvoted by the accounts with the most power.
So I can do two things:
- Spend 4 hours a day in the chatroom making friends, preferably powerful friends. This is a perfectly fine option if you have time, but the reason I joined Steemit was that journalism takes a lot of time for little money. Still the newspaper articles make more money than what I’ve been able to realise so far on Steemit.
My main income already comes from online marketing instead of journalism. With running two businesses I have to be honest and ask myself if this growth rate for Steemit posts is a viable option. In my opinion, for someone with limited amount of time who’s already spending way more time on writing than the revenue allows for (I don’t even want to calculate the hourly fee for the articles I write), the answer is no.
- With that in mind, the only viable option comes from investing in Steemit. This would be great if I could take the risk to lose 1000 USD. (With another 1k I would immediately buy EOS by the way.)
So, that’s where I’m at the moment with no other option than to pursue income via other means than Steemit. Or anyone wants to delegate a massive amount of Steem Power to me? :P
very valid points.
yeah its time consuming and sometimes frustrating to see no movement or big upvotes. But I guess its a long term thing. MAybe you can cut down on the time for each article and avoid spending so much tie for each one?
Another thing you can do is to schedule posts in advance with tools like streemian.com. Just an idea.
Hey Anrike,
I hear you and I absolutely understand what your're talking about. You should check out this post by @yabapmatt: https://steemit.com/steemit/@yabapmatt/how-to-value-steemit-reward-payouts
I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about that. Cheers!
Hi @initforthemoney! I appreciate the point you make in your post @yabapmatt, but hoping for an increase in value in a few years is not a viable business model for a journalist :)
There are more than 900 cryptocurrencies of which most won't be the new Bitcoin. "Over the last few years, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been created and over 90% of them have failed" according to Blockgeeks.
Talking about the value of Steemit, my biggest concern is the difference between the hook ("Make money with quality content") and the reality ("Make money in the long run (maybe), or by investing money or by getting whales to like you").
I'm afraid the payout will only become more polarized when Steemit goes mainstream; millions of users will earn nothing and a handful earns almost everything. That jeopardizes the long-term success of the platform and the possible increase (or decrease!) of the value of Steem.
Don't get me wrong, I think Steemit is a very important step to show ordinary people the possibilities of cryptos and monetising quality content. But in my opinion and experience with Steemit as a professional writer, there need to be changes to the payout system, better curation and improved findability of content for Steemit to work in the long run...
..if the goal of Steemit is to revolutionize and monetize quality content, but maybe the real goal is to invest and trade Steem, or to get Steem to buy Bitcoin. That's perfectly fine also, but then the people interested in Steemit will be traders and not writers, artists or photographers.
It simply takes too much time to make content to get Steem when you can also buy it. Even when I split an article up in shorter pieces, it still takes hours to make and I only earn Steem for a week. Then it loses its value.
Please prove me wrong Steemit! I'll stick around and follow the developments closely. Maybe a better approach is to simultaneously post content here and on a personal website eg., and monetise both. If I understand correctly you won't be killed by cheetah for posting original content simultaneously on multiple platforms, right? Has anyone tried?