I remember watching this video of @ned from a blockchain conference in Las Vegas back in 2016. As far as I’ve understood it, advertising was always part of the plan for Steemit. The caveat was that advertisers would have to buy ads in STEEM, not USD or fiat. That made sense to me as it would be a steady value injection in to the STEEM blockchain. The problem is, and I’m sure this is because Steemit Inc doesn’t have a choice given the current situation, this is probably the WORST time to be talking about rolling out advertising. Other than a handful of mainstays, my feed is a ghost town right now. How are you going to sell Steemit to potential advertisers with this kind of interaction?

One thing I’m curious about is if Steemit does adopt advertisers, I wonder if we’ll see our version of “influencers” arise. The trend on Instagram used to be massive accounts with over 1M followers targeted as influencers, but over the last two years, companies have been going after a high quantity of lower follow based accounts as a shotgun approach. I despise the concept personally, and I even hate using that dumb word, but even my Instagram account has been getting DM’s and emails to become an “influencer”. I wonder if the day is coming where (77) and higher will be trying to sell us Swatch watches and Apple products, lol