Make Hive the wordpress of crypto. Monetized communities.



It’s time to bang that same old drum again.

About the wasted opportunity that we are currently having with hive.

The fact that we have an army of content creators banging out valuable content on a daily basis to give away for free. Yes, we get rewarded in hive but that is from internal payments whereas there is a huge amount of value from our content externally and money that could be brought back into Hive from advertising.

I am hoping to work towards better SEO for hive as I go forward and would encourage a lot of you to do the same when possible. That will be the end goal for producing content on hive as well as creating more engagement on the platform.

We did give a shot back in the very early day but I think that we can do better going forward.
https://hive.blog/hive-174578/@abh12345/help-hive-sprinkle-a-little-seo-on-your-posts

We can see how active the twitter promotion has become lately and how much that has increased our reach. While it will encourage a lot more people to read the content we write on here, ultimately I don’t see it getting us that many new users as web3 takes a lot longer to understand and to integrate with.

Unfortunately bringing these new eyeballs to hive won’t do much for the eco-system as we are giving our content away for free. I have nothing against that in theory but part of joining a decentralized platform for me was the thought that we would be able to monetize our content over time and earn for the effort that we are putting in.

As it stands, the price of hive will continue to fall without investment or speculation to drive it. While lots of users have been buying the token and powering up, there has been no sign of any large investors coming to push the price and that is because there is no business model for the token. Hive gets paid out and then it gets staked or sold. Not exactly a good investment unless you want to think very long term. We also know that not many people think long term in the crypto world but rather in short term gains.

We do hope that an app will bring in enough users to create organic investment in small amounts by a large number of the community. We do have that to an extent but with the number of users that we currently have it is not enough to offset the selling. We would need to 100x our user base and get them to buy into the system of ownership of the platform. Becoming investors as well as users.

As I have stated in the past that should always be the end goal for a decentralized eco-system but we will never get there without solid foundations first of all.

A solid road-map to create this vision and real plans to make that happen. That requires more than just building cool things and hoping that people will come.

This requires us to define what hive is.


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What is Hive?




I would state to somebody that hive is an eco-system for example.

So if I went to an investor to tell them about hive.

I would say that hive is an eco-system for building apps and transaction based businesses on.

These can be social apps, gaming apps, shops, art, personal brands ect...

Anything that can be built or tokenized.

These apps will then create the value for hive by increasing demand for hive itself.

  • Games have users, they need a hive wallet to play.
  • Games have items, you need hive to buy them.
  • Blogs create content, you need hive to advertise on them.
  • Shops sell products, you need hive to purchase them.


So if an investor wants to put money into hive or build on the eco-system there should be a clear path to do so. At the moment we don’t have that.

There should be a clear way to build an app or create a business on hive without having to think about it from the very bottom.

Sign up here. Do this. Create a community for it. Earn ad revenue. Incentivise the community to promote your business. Simple process.



Hive improvement community



I was looking at the Hive improvement community earlier which is ran by some of our top witnesses. There are some brilliant pieces of coding and some unique and original ideas for hive utility from the witnesses but very little on the user experience. It’s actually quite amusing if it wasn’t so tragic but you can tell who is a witness by the title of the posts. Examples of the posts so far.

Witnesses:

  • Social Layers & Reward Pools - Let's Talk About It
  • Atomic Swaps with Hive Core Integration
  • Hive Technical Vision
  • Hivemind API being updated to allow following mute lists
  • Debate: at which rate should the non-airdropped stake be converted to HBD

Users:

  • Brainstorming 10 DAILY Hive Improvement Ideas For 10 Days
  • Our ’attract-users-to-Hive' problem - halfway solved
  • Introducing Hive Incubator - A Marketing Proposal Project
  • Who are the Consumers on Hive? (Bilingual)
  • Tools for Building Sustainable Communities


Don’t get me wrong. I totally appreciate the time and effort that our witnesses put into developing hive and while I can’t understand where they are going with a lot of these posts I’m sure the more technical minded people on the chain will. Those however are the minority in the world.

But you can clearly see the divide between the witnesses technical vision for hive and users wanting to improve the experience of being on hive. For me as with most things in life. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. Keep improving hive capabilities but also add the tools to make a clean and simple user experience. A lot of the users don’t have the skills to do this but we do have the vision to see it.

The majority of people want a plug and play experience. They want to be able to link to hive as easy as Facebook or twitter and just use a fun site. Those are the people being left behind. These technical details do nothing for them and while important we mustn’t forget about the usability side of the chain either.

Users are the life blood of hive and the reason it is here. The 1% build but the 99% actually use these products so it’s very important to keep them in mind when designing something. That means simplicity is key.

Something that people can use and adopt. That is where ads and external revenue come into place. Give people a place to own their content properly.

Build and monetize a community. That they will understand.

I have written about it multiple times in the past but I would hope to get some traction over time. I don’t have the skills to do it myself so I am throwing the ideas out there in the hope that they will resonate with the right people eventually.

https://peakd.com/hive-177032/@niallon11/why-don-t-we-like-money



FinanceLeo:



This is a team who are doing it right. They have found their niche on hive. The team have the skills to build out a separate community and they have a clear business plan to expand their offering and add value to their product through advertising and external revenue. It is no wonder that they keep growing month on month as it is easy to explain what the idea is.

Post good content. Earn Leo tokens. They earn through you sharing that content externally and they buy back the token through external revenue to pass on that value to the people creating the content. Simple plan and one that I can explain to my friends.

You will also notice that the level of content is much higher on their site than on peakd which makes it much easier to share and attracts a lot more external eyes. That is because a lot of it is designed to be seen by other people and the authors want to create professional and interesting content to draw outside views to their work. Not just within the hive echo chamber and so they produce a better standard of article. That and the moderation from the community itself leads to some very good work.

That is why I have been stacking up on the tokens as they will continue to expand on a great product and I’m sure that the team will add a lot of value to my investment over time.



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Now most of my friends don’t care about finance or crypto but they can understand the principal behind this.

Make good content, attract advertising and get paid. The only real difference being that you are using hive as a medium to create that value instead of building it yourself. I remember one dev saying that they would like to see hive becoming the wordpress of crypto. This is how you achieve it.

Give people the ready built tools to monetize their content and communities without needing any technical skills and they will do it.

What do we have here?
People and content.

Who values that?
Advertisers.

From reading one of the improvement posts today, it got a response from me.

It would be great to have ads in my community and receive a portion of those profits in crypto. Hive or otherwise. We are wasting a resource by not earning ad revenue from thousands of people creating content on a daily basis. It's money gone to waste. Think of the marketing possibilities from telling people that they can create a community on hive. There will be some discreet advertising and they will receive a portion of the revenue depending on how active their community is.

That is a much easier sell to non crypto people than what we have at the moment. That is something that they can understand and an incentive to bring in more users and grow the value of the community. That could be pushed into a token or moderator account, whichever way you want to give back to those community members that are creating value for your community. It's the right way to grow a userbase and hive as well.

Turn every blogger and community into a potential business and you will see a lot more people jump into hive. Create the advertising tools to monetize their community and you will see people build. At the moment I could write a masterpiece for my community, share it to facebook and get every person in Ireland to read it and it would be worth zero as they have no hive power to upvote it. I could be drawing in millions of eyeballs for free with my dazzling wit and intellect, ( Don’t worry, I’m not) but it would all be for nothing as best case scenario, you get a few new users.

As it stands they can’t comment on these posts without signing up to hive first which draws them into keys and complications and would turn off a lot of people straight away. Guest accounts would come in handy here with a pre-existing sign in. But that’s another post.

I share my content on twitter daily as there is a crypto audience there and we might get a few users but again it is the minority. If we ever want hive to take off fully we will need to look at what the majority want and design more with that in mind.

I would love to start an Irish community on hive and reach out to people on facebook to start writing there and share ad revenue. It would be something quick and easy to explain to them. Communities could opt into ads or not and receive a share of the overall revenue. Then it is up to the admin to use them for whatever they see fit to incentivize the community, develop it or use it as payment. A successful community could become a full time job and a great reason to bring in even more people and moderate it well.

This for me would be the best kind of marketing possible. Success and a higher token price. Just look at this tweet from @paparazzi app and imagine doing a monthly announcement saying that we will be buying $100k in hive.




https://twitter.com/paparazzi_coin/status/1296845343162687488


If you don’t think that it would get people excited then you are wrong. That is how you get people interested in hive and looking to earn the token. I click into publishOx daily just to upvote a post and get some crypto. Why?

Because it's easy and a share of their earnings. I have a direct link set to the #hive based feed there so at least it's going to authors blogging about hive but the model makes sense. They get eyes on the content. Advertisers pay for those eyes. They give a portion back to those people viewing the content. Simple and effective and has me logging in once a day to earn.

By doing this you are creating a strong brand awareness and creating free marketing just by having a solid business plan and the ability to execute it. Most businesses struggle to get people to use their service but we have people willing to use it already and just need a way to reward that and expand upon it.

We could be doing so much more to grow and this is one hge opportunity that I would love to see followed up on going forward. Hopefully some of the witnesses or devs read this post and start thinking about a business plan to grow the token value and our userbase with one simple, "( probably not that simple to actually put in place), step of creating the tools for people to monetize their content and their community. Give people the tools to bring people in to a community and make it easier to join hive.

By doing this you would be incentivising every single community to become marketing teams and expand our userbase. You would be offering them the chance to earn from having a strong and active community without fighting over votes and creating a level playing field for authors to get rewarded based on their contributions to the community rather than the size of their autovotes. It would become about creating the most active and best moderated community rather than trying to live off scraps from the larger users. It would be more control over your earnings and bring in external money to the system.

There would need to be a system put in place to divide ad revenue between the communities and parameters to judge real activity and value of contributions but I think that it is a good direction to be looking. These could all be put in place if the powers that be were willing to push forward with creating a better space for content creation and growing the hive brand.

Lets grow hive together.



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I can't do much, bit will at least try to think up 10 ideas a day for hive...

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I just try to push common sense and simplicity. People like things that are easy to jump into and while we have made massive improvements since I joined there is still a long way to go.
I do think we are making some of the right moves but would like to see more in a business sense.

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No lie. Just yesterday I was perusing financeleo and I thought to myself, "This is really cool. I wish I could make my own version of this site for my community."

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In theory you could. I've thought the same and would see it as a step forward if you grew a decent sized regular community to move it into a tribe and continue to grow it from there.
I don't have the skills but for the tribe you can get that sorted through @aggroed and hive-engine. Tokenise it and ad revenue to power it.
A ready build solution is what I would really like to see where no computer skills are nessessary and even I can monatise a community just be growing its numbers. That would be unreal.

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I think this is on the roadmap - the ability for communities to have their own ads space and get the revenue. @asgarth is that right? Is PeakD going to develop something like this or is it a feature for Hivemind which then all frontends can utilize?

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If it is then that's a huge step towards bringing in users in my opinion. It opens up so many options for expansion and creates a real reason to use hive that doesn't exist at the moment.

It creates that incentive for people to bring their following to hive and earn from it. At the moment if a decent sized creator lands on hive they need to be supported by the community and some large stakeholders or they leave for more money somewhere else.

With this the incentive is to bring people here and grow your own fan base to make the money. Even better than wordpress as you have a ready to use blog and existing community to try and get to join. From there you can bring in more external people and keep growing.

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OK, just saw this update by someone who is working on it: https://peakd.com/hive-139531/@imwatsi/an-update-on-native-ads

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I remember seeing him posting about this a year ago but hadn't seen anything about it since the split. Depending on how they go about implementing the ads it could be a huge win for hive. Even if it is not large amounts at the start, ad revenue will be used to create buy pressure on the token. We can use it as a marketing tool. We can offer people a reason to buy hive and to create on hive.

We could see the first token with a proper existing economy in a few years that crosses into content creation, gaming, investment, online purchases and hopefully a debit card if the application for crypto.com is successful.

Earn hive for your content and spend it in real life. Just transfer straight to your crypto card and it's ready to go. No waiting time. No transfer fees. It's a no brainer.

With a higher price more people will join and with ads to create a buying pressure there is money to offset the selling and create a positive cycle of earning and use.

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Yeah, I think it can be big, and if you have thoughts about how it can be implemented for best results, perhaps you can provide input to @imwatsi. Now is the time.

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I hopped over to his post earlier and had a few comments with him. Just to give some thoughts and he seemed to be looking along the same lines as me even if there will need to be some more intermediary services to supply ads in the future. I think it will take a work around to get to what i am looking at but he is making a good start for it.
It definite progress anyway.

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This can be big.

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It can be massive if built in the right way.

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I think that communities are the key to develop Hive. When people join Hive they mostly are just overwhelmed by the whole thing. So much to learn, so much to understand.

Within the small CTP community, we are able to take new users by the hand and encourage them to continue. I believe that it should be the communites that reach out to new users. The more people we bring to hive, the more ideas we bring as well. With every new member there is the potential that this person will bring a big change to hive. The people from outside bring a fresh approach and see the potential of Hive with different eyes.

I totally agree with you that we should sell this space better by showing ads on the front ends. I mean where can you touch as many crypto interested people as on Hive?

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I think that communities are the key to develop Hive. When people join Hive they mostly are just overwhelmed by the whole thing. So much to learn, so much to understand.

Fully agree with you and that is why my idea is so important. It will create revenue for the people running the communities and give them an incentive to get new members and increase the exposure of it's posts by getting ad revenue based on how popular the community is.

With this in mind you could start a football community and if the posts there were bringing more people in to read and write you would increase your share of the ad earnings. This would let you increase your voting power by buying hive and let you earn for the effort of running and advertising your community to the world.

I know that if i could build a community of 1000 people posting daily and that it would earn me $200 a week as my share of the ad revenue, for example. That would be a living wage in some countries and a great reason to go out and find 1000 people to join the community and keep them active with contests, engagement and voting power.

Start a Nigerian community for people to join and discuss the local area, make them as niche as you like as long as they are active and being shared externally. We have 5000 daily posters on hive at the moment but if each of those early adopters had incentive to create their own niche community that could 100x in a short space of time and increase the ad revenue. That would bring in even more people as the token price rises.

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Agreed, so how do we make this happen?

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There is a person working on them at the moment but the implementation of anything is above my pay grade. I'm just the ideas guy. I was looking at his post today after being pointed in the right direction.
https://peakd.com/hive-139531/@imwatsi/an-update-on-native-ads

niallon11
This is brilliant and exactly the direction that we need to be going in. I have written about it many times and hope to see ads on our blogs and communities in the near future.
I would love to see it get to the stage where we just click an opt in button for our account or community and get a hive or bitcoin payment every month relative to the factors set for value of the account and total price of ads for the month.
I know it might take a while to get there but simplicity is everything in the online world and being able to show people how to create their own monatized space just by bloogijg on hive or creating a busy community is a huge selling point. Cut out wordpress altogether and let people build here and piggyback off the full content library and seo of hive.
It's the future for earning from online activities.
I was writing about this just yesterday and was shown to your post. I do remember your old posts from last year but hadn't seen anything about since so it's great to see you making more progress.

imwatsi
You're right, I also believe there's a lot of value in this. I wrote an article about the exponential effects of "perceived attention value" that might interest you:
https://peakd.com/steem/@imwatsi/insights-into-the-exponential-effects-of-steem-price-vs-perceived-attention-value
As for multi-currency support, a @blocktrades integration in the future could support direct conversion to support other cryptos as payment for ads.

niallon11
As for multi-currency support, a @blocktrades integration in the future could support direct conversion to support other cryptos as payment for ads.
I don't mind the multi-currency so much at the moment depending on how the ads are going to be sourced as for me the most important part of integrating ads is that they are used to add buying pressure to hive on the markets.
Whatever source the ads are coming from if that is payed in bitcoin to a custodial account, that the money is used to purchase hive from the markets and add buying pressure to the hive token. If it is USD that again it's used to purchase hive and distribute that amount between the accounts showing the ads.
A lot of which would get powered up and use their voting power to attract more people into their community and further the positive cycle.
Ads will only add value to hive if they are coming from an external source with an external source of revenue to feed into our system. If the ads are only sourced internally from hive the demand won't be there for them and it will only be hive getting recycled rather than outside money coming into the system and feeding the token price which is what we badly need.
If the hive for ads is bought externally first and then used to buy ad space that works too but i'm not sure how many advertising sources would go to that trouble or if there is more to be made from already existing infrastructure that requires less effort. Simplicity is always key and most companies just want to pay per click or google ads...ect.
Just some thoughts as I don't know what your plans are with the design to allow ads on HIVE but i'm sure that you have a plan and have come up with a good one. Have you checked out the @leofinance site as they have already brought this into play for their tribe and have been using the ad revenue to buy their token from the market and add value to it?
https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@steem.leo/july-leoad-report-all-time-high-for-leofinance-users-and-ad-revenue

imwatsi
I agree with your point on simplicity. Front-ends will be free to use whatever token models they want, I'm keeping flexibility in mind when designing the protocol.
I suspect that there will be services that bridge that gap and bring fiat money, other cryptos and traditional ad agencies into the Hive economy, through Native Ads. It will be an opportunity for entrepreneurs. If our dApps have attention that can be monetized, many ways to bridge the gaps will be developed. I'll make sure the core protocol supports it.
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I'll share more aspects of the design when I make an alpha release and keep seeking feedback from the community.

niallon11
Great to hear it. Keep up the good work and looking forward to more updates. I think that this is the most important thing being built for hive right now and appreciate the work that you are putting into it.

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Not sure if you’re aware, but community owners can already enable promotions/ads in their communities. I wrote about it here
https://peakd.com/hive-156509/@midlet/post-promotion-and-advertising-in-oca

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I did see your post at the time and have looked at it again there now but it would be a different direction to what I am looking at right now. Yours is internal promotion from existing users where as i would be looking at external sources with external revenue coming into the system. It's a good idea for exposure for newer users and certainly has it's place on peakd but it won't create buy pressure for HIVE imo.

I would be hoping more for a google ads idea on the site with the revenue divided between the interface for setting it up and the creators depending on views/clicks some type of quantification. An automatic ad placement that would be paid for with external funds and bring value back into the system for all of us.

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Yea, I definitely think the option you’re referring to would be a great addition as well. More options are certainly better, but I think the thing that’s stopping what currently exists is not it’s design, the internal vs external dichotomy you mentioned. It’s that we don’t have enough users for advertisers to be interested.

Honestly if we had 10x the number of users that we have, we still wouldn’t be at the critical mass where advertisers would be super interested in advertising.

So at our current scale I agree that something like Google ads would be more lucrative more than likely, but if we can break into, not even the mainstream, but honestly just relevance, a direct,specific, targeted ad model would make more money than Google ads, but I think they could be a better way to bootstrap to get to more lucrative advertising.

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Over time I can see a more direct selling model be a lot more profitable but as you said we don't have the numbers to create that interest. Maybe in a few years it could work with a large increase in adoption.

For now it's about quick and easy in my opinion. Got money flowing in. Create buy pressure on hive and grow the user base.

A place to get started and built more towards the model that you have over time with more targeted advertising.

Posted using Dapplr

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We do hope that an app will bring in enough users to create organic investment in small amounts by a large number of the community. We do have that to an extent but with the number of users that we currently have it is not enough to offset the selling. We would need to 100x our user base and get them to buy into the system of ownership of the platform. Becoming investors as well as users.

This is actually something we don't need to do, and it's one of the best parts about how Hive works, IMO. Requiring users to invest in a token to use your app is a backwards model that doesn't work well. Instead, the app should be the one who invests in the token in order to allow their users to use the platform. As an example, when you use Netflix, they don't make you buy AWS credits, and when you use Facebook they don't make you buy data center tokens. Users pay (or generate revenue for) the apps, and the apps pay for the back-end services that they use.

I believe this is the better model and luckily is already part of Hive. In Splinterlands, we don't expect or require any of our players to have to buy HIVE. Instead we buy the HIVE and delegate it to them as necessary. If we 10x our player base then we will need to 10x our HP holdings. It is a much more reasonable expectation for businesses (apps) to be the ones to manage HP than to require each user to individually deal with that.

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This is actually something we don't need to do, and it's one of the best parts about how Hive works,
In Splinterlands, we don't expect or require any of our players to have to buy HIVE. Instead we buy the HIVE and delegate it to them as necessary.

You say this but I have invested thousands of #hive into splinterlands through purchases. 😂

This has the effect of topping up the splinterlands account to enable gameplay but it is what I meant by organic investment. People buying hive for use case. Or buying it to tip a content creators on a certain app or just to power up and have a better vote.

I agree with your statement of the app powering the accounts but if we had 1m bloggers a portion of those would certainly buy from the markets for more voting power, exposure and profitability of curation.That and to own a piece of hive for investment purposes and ownership of the system.

I pay netflix every month to use their system and to power more content creation by the team. The only difference being that that it is rent instead of ownership imo as they can cancel your account at any time or change your services. With hive if you buy in you own your account and part of the eco-system. With facebook you effectively create data center tokens by using it but cannot sell them. Instead you create for facebook to sell and profit through ads.

That is why I would love to see ads empowered for communities and blogs as creators would post to communities with the best curation and voting power. People would power up to curate their community and attract content creators, in turn earning larger portion of the advertising rewards and powering those up to increase the positive cycle and attract more creators with a larger vote.

External money would be buying hive from the markets instead of relying on the existing community to keep the price up and the few popular apps like yourselves that are earning from external sources. But this takes a long time and a good team to create an external demand for your products. In advertising terms we already have the product which is content and eyeballs, we just don't have the infrastructure to capitalize on that at the moment.

The best marketing tool that hive could have right now is a higher token price. I guarantee that with $2 hive we would have a lot more people operating on the system and choosing it ahead of alternative platforms. Crypto social media is basically an arms race where we have surrendered the lead to competitors and will continue to lose ground over time without a business model to suit what we have. With more users comes more ad revenue, with more ad revenue will come more users. It's all about having a positive cycle instead of the reverse which we saw on steem as the price dropped in 2018 and users left in droves.

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