2017 has been a great year for steemit. We have a lower Alexa rating than ever before (this is good). As of writing, we have a global rating of 1708, and we are sitting at 690 in the united states alone. This is amazing, and i am sure that 2018 will be an even better year. We are giving people the ability to speak of their passions, spread their ideas, and get paid to do it.
We are creating a platform where we can support each other's dreams, and i find that wonderful. But i see a use for steemit that has not yet been utilized yet, at least not to its fullest, Journalism.
In the age of the internet, one of the most common ways of creating revenue is through ads. This might work fine on youtube (It does not work fine, look at adpocalypse, which is why DTube is the future), but it creates an issue for the more established news media.
When the thing that counts is not the quality of your content, but rather the catchiness of your title, good journalism has a hard time surviving. When the success of an article is measured in amount of clicks, stories about the war in Syria loses out to videos of kittens, and thus we all lose out.
But this is where we, my fellow steemians, can make a difference (let’s take a moment to pat ourselves on the back). Steemit was created to reward good content. Sure, we see issues with autovoting, bots, and people raping the reward pool, and we will need to sort these issues out, but i still see amazing opportunities ahead.
So maybe 2018 will not just be a great year for steemit, maybe it will be a great year for journalism as well?
Thanks for reading
