| Platform | Finance? | Content Monetization | Open Source? | User Count | Market Cap | Cap/user |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No | No | No | 1.6B | $353 Billion | $220.625 | |
| No | No | No | 313M | $11.92 Billion | $38.33 | |
| No | No | No | 403M | $25.7 Billion | $63.77 | |
| no | no | no | 100 Million | $7.7 Billion | $77 | |
| Western Union | yes | no | no | Hundreds of Millions | $9.71B | unk |
| Visa | yes | no | no | 2.1 Billion | 182.1B | $86 |
| MasterCard | yes | no | no | 2 Billion | 103.5B | $51.5 |
| Steemit | yes | yes | yes | 43k | 200M | $4,651 |
And there we have it! Steemit is, in fact priced with a premium because people think that it can scale-- they hope that it can scale anyway. Or, people recognize that a business with an integrated blockchain that creates a content backed currency has legs and are investing in that. One way or another, Steem is priced pretty high compared to its scaled peers..... or is it?
If we anticipated that Steemit could reach scale (let's call this 1 billion users for lack of any better number) and could provide the services of financial companies and of content driven social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and whatever next year's fad is, it's quite easy indeed to see why Steemit commands such a premium: this is your classic Buckminster Fuller type of innovation: It's so much better that it's hard to recognize that it is a sea-change as first.
Open source has been a boon for commmunity growth across the board. Steemit leverages this wisely, ensuring that the platform will end up highly distributed and resilient. Steemit encourages broad stakeholder participation, and is building its brand as "the blockchain." This will take time, and the price may dip further, but really, who cares?
This isn't and was never meant to be a short-term project. Personally, my SP isn't going to budge till there's $100k or so of it, and I can use it to pay living expenses while earning more thorough posts. If you could invest in all of these companies at once, would you?