Have you seen https://gitlab.com/dawn-network/nexus - pretty much entirely my work though I give credit to where I got the ideas. That isn't the actual content monetisation system, just the core, which has 4 parts
- the network membership discovery protocol
- the replication protocol (ensuring everyone has the same data in their database)
- an account registry (similar to Steem, pseudonymous, but accounts will not require a minimum balance)
- a messaging protocol for short, immediate messages and bigger, slower transmitted (email and IM) - this one ostensibly will use clusters of rendezvous nodes to cache messages for a specific nearby node
These elements are fundamental, before you get to a protocol for opportunistically caching data redundantly on the network. The part that is relevant to this topic, specifically, is my 'agoric routing' system, which nodes generate 'proof of service' certificates which the validator nodes judge to determine if they are valid and using network distance algorithms, scaling the payment according to how distant the new connections are (ie, it will pay you less to watch your friends video than someone who is tens of degrees of separation from you, as shown in the ledger.
So beyond the 4 elements above, which I believe are essential, you then have the token ledger and a means to being paid (like here on steem, but not with votes, just by assessing network distance between nodes that could collude to manufacture false proof of service - most pertinently in the situation where you are pulling the content off a server within your own LAN or - well, I haven't fully elucidated the abuse potential completely, and how to stop it, but I already have described how the payouts reduce if the account that signs the receipt of delivery and the caching node and/or the uploader of the content, are too closely interacting in their financial dealings.
I'm going to be continuing to work on it but I think that I've gone far enough to be elegible for one of those prizes... And I think that getting the right ruleset for how to monetise is critical. I don't think voting is necessarily a good mechanism for tracking content consumption and rewarding creators for creating viral content.
People, like with facebook, happily expend their resources to no reward for just the reward of sharing, so, just like Steem, I think that if you could generalise the definition of content (although ultimately there must be a little base text in any content, think of video cover blurbs or the backs of books), and accurately discover real 'hits' on the content, and then issue new tokens based on this, it would be revolutionary, even more than Steem, and in fact form the basis of a 'distributed web'.
But the gen pop still is barely grasping what a blockchain is (it's just a distributed database, ultimately) let alone a 'inflation tax based monetisation system'. Dan Larimer was a genius coming up with this idea. I just think he overcomplicated some parts and we see now that the system has dispensed with a lot of his poorly formed ideas about how it should work, though the general principles are there. Distributed web will obsolete steem, but I think that steem is also positioned to migrate to the new model, if the governance system manages to work and people pay attention to the ideas that the platform itself enables people to not just propose but be compensated for it...
I have just recently got the taste of what it means to actually not have to work (a good surplus and a few mining rigs) and I don't really care if I am not the one who builds the system but I'll be more than happy to chew your ear off about how I think it should be built :)
Cool stuff!