" Anthony Noto is a multimedia journalist focused on venture capital and Silicon Alley startups. Based in New York for the Business Journals, he previously was a reporter at SourceMedia and The Deal LLC. He is a graduate of Rutgers University. "
For YouTube stars and so-called influencers, posting content to social media websites can be quite lucrative. The rest of us get zilch.
Entrepreneurs Ned Scott and Dan Larimer are looking to change that. The duo co-founded Steemit, a bitcoin-inspired social network that rewards those who sign up with cryptocurrency. By continuously posting pictures, authoring articles, or "upvoting" other people's content, Steemit users can gain “Steem Power” and earn cash.
So far, New York-based Steemit is ahead of other publishing platforms such as Twitter, Medium and Odyssey — none of which pay users for uploading content. Talks have begun at Facebook to allow users to monetize, but they're in the very early stages. Steemit CEO Scott spoke with the New York Business Journal about how he and BitShares founder Larimer stayed ahead of the curve. Users are given a portion of Steem when they sign up. How much do they receive? We have a small fund of the cyptocurrency and we're basically paying people $3 of Steem Power to sign up. So, there's a small sign up incentive there. That can last. With the market cap where it is now, that gives us wiggle room to give Steem away to sign up. It was down to $5 million, but the whole platform went live just a couple months ago. Once we got on exchanges, the market cap has slowly grown to $30 million. (via CoinMarketCap) Who's backing Steemit? We haven't publicly disclosed investor information yet. But we had an angle investor come on board back in February with a quarter million dollars. So that's all that was raised. My business partner (Larimer) and I are trying to take baby steps. We want to show the public that we gained traction organically. Things are starting to pick up. We're not paying for any advertising. It's bootstrapped now, but we're gearing up to do a sizable seed round. We can keep building from that. Is there a vetting process to bring certain users on board?
http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2016/05/31/steemit-ceo-get-paid-for-that-social-media-post.html