I think that professional content creators should be able to reliably make at least the USD equivalent of 500/week (of which only half would be liquid) AND anyone who puts real effort into creating good content/making the site better should be able to count on some level of meaningful compensation for doing this.
Even with a lox-quality UX, this would guaranty user retention and drive new user adoption as word got out. And when all of the bloggers currently writing for HuffPost, etc. etc. (for extremely low pay) quit to blog on Steemit, their audiences would come with them leading to mass adoption.
And this is exactly why I was on the fence on this issue! This is a great point on being able to provide enough for a modest living (depending on where the individual lives of course.) You have great points here!
Now that you mention it, why aren't we targeting more for underpaid HuffPost or other high profile publications bloggers! And if at least some who come over here are comfortable with it, this would make a great piece of a marketing strategy. On one side you get to use either 'Bloggers with or formerly with the HuffPost', on the other you can market that everyday authors are able to make a Modest living here. There's no way everybody is going to get rich, there just not enough resources for that (even on the best of days) to happen.
Let's end the campaign of targeting crypto related people (I'm all for them to come of board) but if Steemit is going to 'make it' they have to reach the pop culture, non-crypto, most have never thought/heard of anarchism or libertarianism. FB started targeted on students, people with edu (and i think org) emails only. I can not imagine a scenario where they would have survived had they only targeted that niche.
In reality what we need right now are CONTENT CONSUMERS!!! We need people who are here to Read and Comment. Soooo, maybe we should start a discussion on targeting readers? I've heard about the inability to be seen on other social media sites, so lets take a different route. I want to see the trend of steemit ambassadors come back. We need to put together a collection of materials for people to be able to go out and 'preach the word of steem.' It can all be digital, so really not a huge cost. The biggest thing would be getting a top notch powerpoint presentation together (which ambassadors could trim down so the talk fit the audience), ideally some 'mentor' available to help better prepare the ambassador the for presentation and questions (ideally.)
What we need is to reinvigorate the word of mouth campaign. Let's make a contest looking for the best such and such (pick an underserved tag) and have an $500 SD first prize (or however much) that is ONLY eligible on first time posts. We ALSO need buy-in from the community on things like this not to just sock-puppet accounts to acquire funds that fundamentally defeats the stated purpose. At some freaking point we have to find SOMETHING the whole community can agree upon.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text here. Obviously this is something I'm passionate and concerned about!
I share your passion on the subject. For the last several years, the bulk of my income has been earned from online writing, and Steemit pays far, far less than that at present. I have personally been signing up four or five new users a week - a few of whom are really taking to the platform - and a small but growing portion of my regular readership is now reading my stuff here. But most of my regular readers will not create accounts until there is far more clarity about how Steemit works on the landing page. They just click on direct links to read and then move on to other, more familiar websites. (This is standard, in my experience. The weekly news report I edit has 14K subscribers and nearly fifty times as many readers.)
Simply providing better pageview and other metrics on steemit.com would go a long way to clarifying the actual reach of steemit posts. This, in turn, would make the site far more attractive to investors as well as to prospective active users.
The bounties are great, but we still don't have a good incentivized referral system. And the people I know in media will not do more than dip their toes in the water here until content creators are paid industry standard compensation.
IMHO, we are under-capitalized and poorly marketed as a whole. People like me are helping with the latter issue, but I feel there is strong ideological reluctance around here to discuss the former issue in any terms that non-crypto investors would find familiar enough to pay attention to.
Through conversations like this, though, I imagine that these problems will likely be solved sooner rather than later: )