An open SMT payout future and cross-pollination

I write lots of different content but, in general, stay away from time attached material unless it is Steem related. There are several reasons for this with the main one being I don't care about the news but, a secondary one being, I want it to be timeless, to be able to be read at any point and still have a high probability of relevance.

Why, well, I always envisaged that one day, the content I create could be valuable beyond a week and perhaps, generate residuals. This is not possible with the current 7 day payout (it was 30 when I started here) but, as far as I know, should be possible with SMTs.

Before we get into that though, let's think about a platform like Youtube in comparison to @Dtube. When it comes to potential advertising material the 7 day payout window is very short (let's pretend discovery is easier too) and when it comes to potential residual earnings, it is untenable. One week isn't long enough for a professional to get the earnings necessary.

For example, there is currently ~300 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute. Yes, minute. How much of it do you think really gets seen? Probably not much but, let's say that you are looking for a DIY tutorial, how often is the video you found produced in the last week?

Limited time, limited potential

 
You tube has a massive catalogue of content but once you filter out the movie trailers, music videos and short lived content, the things that get views and create long-term ad revenue streams are the videos that are informative and aren't tied to a position in time. And cat videos. So, pretty much whatever you want to find a video on, Youtube has it.

If one of the massive Youtubers came onto Steem, even if they were getting 1000 dollar posts consistently, it would not be enough to outperform Youtube. Of course, for the mid-level Youtubers, it would definitely outperform them at that rate. And for people like Jerry.. who cares. They need the residual earnings, the views that will keep adding revenue weeks, months and years later.

So, this is where an SMT could close the gaps or, in this case, widen them to allow posts to remain open indefinitely.

At this point I am going to give the audience a caveat:

I have no idea how SMTs will work in practice

 
An SMT could essentially have an indefinite payout period and still run under Steem as far as I know. How I envisage this working is that the SMT layer above the Steem blockchain can interact with the chain according to Steem rules but, issue its own token however it wants to do so. This means that they could potenntially set up a daily, weekly, or monthly payout point or, mix and match, for example, pay the first 4 payments weekly and then monthly after that depending on the view rate.

This would mean that old content that lay on a shelf could be unearthed years later and suddenly find that it is again relevant and attracting large numbers of views. Even an article that happened to touch upon something that ended up being prophetic could suddenly be the attractor of a huge amount of interest. This would mean that an account could keep earning across time indefinitely depending on relevance or marketing.

Distribute those tokens

 
SMTs will have another unique feature that supports this because it is possible to vote on a post with more than one coin. So, A vote on a Steem post could also be voted on simultaneously with an SMT token. What this means (in my head) is that even though a post could be closed for voting on the Steem blockchain, it may be possible for an SMT to reopen it in the eyes of their own token and with an independent interface, have a whole new voting schedule and independent payout rules on it.

Essentially, it could be possible that one day, an SMT trawls Steem for relevant articles to unearth, sells them on their own platform and pays through its own coin or beneficiaries to the attached Steem account, even if the author hasn't signed up with that particular token. Perhaps there will be checkbox somewhere asking for permission to licence it for royalties.

There are many ways I see that this could be of huge benefit for revenue streams of authors here as it could potentially feed content aggregators and offer authors reward through syndication without having to ever really approve much or worry about theft of work as everything will be trackable back to the original.

There would be some authors/producers that would see their earnings increase incredibly over time as their content would be continually pushed up the most viewed ranks or, popular on certain tags etc.

Import content and users

 
Doing it this way (once set up) would also potentially allow new SMTs to select some core content to begin with for their database that would give them quality and depth without a large user base. It could also attract cross-platform SMT polination where users are able to interact more effectively without having to start from scratch on each platform also. Perhaps there would be a way to select and port some Steem content across.

Going back to Youtube's 300 hours a minute of video being uploaded, most of that will never see a human pair of eyes but, there it is. Most of it will be filtered out or be so lowly ranked, it is unlikely to even garner a few views. I can't find recent statistics but in 2014 (an eternity ago), more than 1/3 of Youtube videos had less than 10 views. Since then, the bots have taken over there too but, the algorithms filter most of them out. The real number of watched videos would be much, much lower with those monetized being just a tiny fraction of the total number.

Due to the versatility of SMTs being able to divide their pool however they choose, the range of options available is incredibly large with most not having been though about much at all yet. SMTs, would could massively simplify the monetization of per-view sites as well as be able to potentially both protect providers from theft and, open them up to revenue streams that were previously unknown.

A little in the wallet

 
Let's say that there is an SMT wallet view that is able to track the payments on content no matter the SMT nor where it is used. Potentially, something like every video embed or Facebook share could bring some SMT earnings that would show up in the wallet. What would be cool is if then there is a feature that says, Convert to Steem and it will automatically buy the equivalent in Steem, if one so wants.

Again, I have no idea if any of this is possible through the technology but, I am pretty sure that there is a lot of freedom that can be found through SMTs that create new potential revenue streams and increase engagement and user experience in many areas, not just on Steem.

I wish I had some developer skills or, my wallet was large enough to pay for some because the SMT future has the potential to be huge if people get creative and connect the technology with the various communities who demand all types of content. They better do a good job on the infrastructure they are working on now because if SMTs deliver, the potential traffic is going to be enormous.

It is very easy to get caught up in the day to day shenanigans that is current Steem yet, it is a good idea to sometimes imagine what Steem could be. Not just in price but in the development, the potential platforms and how it could solve various issues we face. At least, it is fun to think about, possible or not and could give some ideas to various developers that can use it as a base to create something killer.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]