Lately I have been reflecting on the utility of Hive but most important the utility of blogging. There was a time on the internet blogging was the hip thing to do. Companies had a corporate blog as a way to casually communicate with their shareholders, costumers and partners. This was part of a vision of openness. One of the big champions of that movement was Sun Microsystem's CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
The blogging movement was also driven by technologist Doc Searls, which envision the markets as conversations.
In its central thesis that "markets are conversations", the work asserts that the Internet is unlike conventional media used in mass marketing as it enables conversations amongst consumers and between consumers and companies, which are claimed to transform traditional business practices. - Wikipedia [1]
The book was focus on the business nature with the new technology at the turn of the millennium. Anticipating what we would know as the Web 2.0, 8 years from then. But also what we would learn that software was meant to be commodities, like bricks, or wood to build houses or offices. That's the basis of open source software, as construction material to get us to the next level which is the communication itself. It means that Wordpress, Drupal, Mediawiki, and all that open source software including GNU/Linux, Apache HTTP Server, PHP, MySQL and all the other things were meant to be just steps into communicating efficiently with the world wide web.
As I later built a narrative that Bitcoin was offspring from Bittorrent which was prevalent during that blogosphere era. Which in term was meant to be one of the last pieces of building blocks which turn the action of blogging into a complete business. This because most of the blogging business was being held by advertisement. Prominent bloggers will 'rent' space on their website to collect income through web rings. Or collection of vendors and partner websites all sharing each other banners to cross promote or promote 3rd party business. Pop ups were also prominent in the mid 2000s.
Advertising also had it's own evolution. When Microsoft, which probably was the most dominating company at the time introduced it's Windows 98, they had a goal to push people through their Internet Explorer to a more 'Web Friendly' experience. This was clearly looked at how most of the OS tools were connected to the browser engine. From the file manager to the Desktop itself.
But this was not apparent unless you were a developer, what you would see and be greeted with, was a somewhat annoying bar of ads from MSN. In an attempt to fight AOL and other Internet Providers, MSN wanted to become it's own ecosystem. Having buttons from Disney, WB, AOL and NBC. Other tools also followed such idea, specially Real Player, which also had those buttons on their application.
The idea is have a cohesive environment of information toward the corporations that paid a lot of money to sit on your desktop. This was the Web 1.0. The Web 2.0 however, you could enjoy this space on your own website and even control an audience toward your site and your Amazon Wishlist cart in a digital "Wild West" for monetization. If you ran a hobbyist blog or niche forum, you had to physically seek out companies, pitch your traffic metrics, and manually negotiate ad contracts. This lead to the rise of a tiny company called Google and their AdSense service.
The money situation with Blogging has always been a factor of the way we blog and why we do it. The vision of the internet as a way to share recipes was not wrong and open source was a testimony for it. But understanding the business part of the conversation has always been a tricky territory. Corporations and companies have jump into the opportunity and capitalize on it, but also the organic web never really stop this model of building relationships. We still see Instagram Models, and Youtube influencers become very wealthy once they start getting patrons and companies start promoting on their shows. Same with podcasts and other source of communication.
This is an interesting history of our culture on the web and understanding the origins of such give us a better vision of what other opportunities could have been skipped or the benefits of doing things in a different way. Bitcoin in my opinion was a solution that might have come too late for the indie advertiser as many really wished to have an independent way to monetize the attention. Steem became that crypto that embrace the ecosystem but only partially as most of the users of the platform still not selling advertising which limits their monetizing opportunities. Just like some youtubers feel with Google, and other companies like Patreon serve them to fill that void, and have a subscription model, we still looking for a good Ad network. Brave understood this and according to their reports, it has grown past the $100 million milestone.
There is an opportunity to combine Hive blogosphere with Brave Ad network and have users be able to fill their blog with as many ads as they see fit and also collecting on Ad revenue as well as users 'vote' in Hive. This could be made easy as bloggers merge the business with their hobby and not just rely on the whims of one market economy.
Alternatively Hive could build it's own Ad Network and be able to collect and split revenue with their bloggers as they drive traffic into the chain. What other solutions you can get with this matter? Will our goal for blogging be better rewarded?