Steem is a cool idea. Here's how it could become really BIG!

In this article I'll analyze Steem and its enormous potential for the content industry. Most of you will have already heard the complaints that many media companies struggle with a waning of paying customers and low revenue from ads.

Steem is a possible solution. As other authors have written already, Steem's content monetizing model is well thought out. It gives authors a strong incentive to participate and to publish good content. In this article, I will describe what makes Steem different from other content monetization platforms and why it may be a breakthrough in the area.

But I will also propose an improvement, because I think Steem could be really a big player. Maybe not the next Facebook, but it surely could overtake Reddit, Quora and similar content-focused communities.

The big strength of Steem

Steem's economy is based on the idea that people will pay for content if it doesn't feel like paying.

That is a major breakthrough in content monetization. We had, until now, three types of systems for direct content monetization (not taking into account ad-based approaches):

• The first is the classic micropayment approach or pay wall. There, you have some kind of account, and when you want to read an article, you will have to pay a small amount of money. That works for highly specialized content and really big players in the media industry, but not for blogs and regular online magazines.
• The second one is the tipping model. Here, payment of micro-amounts is voluntary. Unfortunately, it does work only in very specific cases. There are very few people who can live from it.
• The third one, and the most interesting to compare to Steem, is the Flattr/Kachingle model. It's like a multi-website flatrate: You pay a small monthly fee and then by every upvote the author gets a fraction of your money. It's entirely voluntary, too.

Steem is a little bit similar to Flattr. But there is a big difference: In Flattr, you must make a monthly payment to be able to reward authors. It's a concious decision you must take, and you give up a part of your money.

That is different in Steem: You normally start - if you register at its main web application, Steemit - with a reasonable amount of Steem Power to participate. And Steem and Steem Power are continuously generated.

It simply doesn't feel like you are paying something when you write and vote up content. And if you want, you can buy more influence buying Steem and converting it to Steem Power, but you have no monthly minimum like in Flattr.

Steem could be a better Flattr - it should be website-agnostic

For now, if you want to earn money with Steem you should publish your content inside the Steemit website. Even if you use the steemd daemon to publish, you content would be visible mainly at that one centralized portal.

This is a limitation. Because many content publishers and authors will want to use their own means to publish content - their Wordpress blogs or HTML sites. There are many possible reasons: a custom design, ads as a second income channel, brand building, interactive or innovative website elements and so on.

So what would we need? A Steem button! In short: a button that lets publishers integrate Steem as a monetization model, that could be embedded it in the source code of their website. And users could vote the content up with a simple click. Like Facebook's Like and Share buttons.

Probably a Steem button implementation is a bit more complex than the Like buttons of the big centralized social networks, because we can't simply embed a small code snippet from a centralized server. It would have to be implemented as a CMS extension, e.g. a Wordpress plugin.

There are some factors to consider for a convincing solution. So, first of all, such a button should not save the whole content of every blog post on the Steem blockchain, because then it would be flagged by search engines as duplicate content when Steemit retrieves it from there. It would be enough to include link, title and meta description. Reddit shows that these link-based posts also would be honored from users that use the centralized Steemit site.

Second, there must be a Steem client running at the server where the blog resides, that would retrieve Steem votes and comments. For this we would need a light-weight solution.

But these are technical details that can be achieved by skilled programmers with the approval of the Steem team. And the return could be really outstanding.

Imagine the Steem button becoming the second or third standard social media button on websites besides the Facebook Like, replacing Instagram's or even Twitter's one. It could be the premier content monetization solution in the blogosphere and for online media.

The Steem button could even be used by real charities and open source projects for fundraising (not the fake ones promoted in some Steemit articles).

For this goal, however, I would also suggest to change the payment schedule: upvotes which lead to payments should be possible at least for a year, not only for 30 days. That would also provide a strong incentive for quality long-term oriented content, like how-tos, Wikipedia-like knowledge articles, and even books.

This way, Steem could grow into something really big. Not only into a successor for Flattr, but into a real competitor for the major social networks. I don't think it will compete directly with Facebook because FB is also a personal communication suite for users' family & friends. And I honestly don't see Steem or Steemit replacing this.

But Steem could succeed where Flattr failed, because of its intelligent economic system. For this reason it should be truely open sourced and developed into a website-agnostic content-monetization network. The entire Steem community would benefit from it, even those that prefer to use a centralized website like Steemit, because the user base could grow MUCH bigger this way - by orders of magnitude. And it would probably overtake Bitcoin as the market leader in cryptocurrency.

I have read that a Steemit button was mentioned in an interview with a Steem team member, with no precisions about an implementation, probably as a long-term goal. And there is also an independent community proposal for a Wordpress plugin, but it seems to have stalled because of problems with the API. I think the Steem button and website integration should be the top priority. It is crucial for its long-term success - much more than chat or friending.

That are my thoughts on Steemit after reading the whitepaper and reading around for about a week. Feel free to agree, disagree and comment it ;-)