The growth of Hive is dependent on the development of novel front ends that expand Hive's use cases and bring in new users. We have seen this happening at an accelerating pace, with projects ranging from Hive communities, to simple forks of the original Hive.blog front end that have their own communities and token incentives in addition to Hive incentives, like Sports Talk Social and Splintertalk, all the way to full dApps that do things Hive wasn't originally intended for, like Aureal for podcasting and Podping, which actually uses Hive as podcast aggregator infrastructure, lowering bandwidth usage for podcast apps.
But there is another opportunity to expand the Hive ecosystem that has been right there in front of us this whole time but not taken advantage of:
There are tons of websites for sale on sites like Flippa. You can find anything from blogs to news sites to ecommerce. Many of these sites already have large user bases that could not only bring in revenue, but also could become new Hive users themselves if the site were to promote Hive.
There are a few scenarios where this might work.
Of course, there are some risks to Hive that come with doing something like this, especially when it comes to receiving funding from the DHF. Back when Hive was that other blockchain before the fork, we had teams like DLive come in and get funding, then ditch us to create their dApp on their own blockchain. That wasn't cool at all. We definitely don't want to open the floodgates to allow anyone to do that. So maybe some smart contract infrastructure in place first to help mitigate that possibility would be prudent.
Then there's the possibility that even if the people receiving funding are honest, they just pick a bad website, or one that is doing well at the time but ends up with decreasing traffic and thus revenue. But this could be mitigated by getting together teams of smart people to evaluate their potential before submitting a proposal to the DHF. One great thing about Hive is that there are a lot of eyes here that we can easily point towards things like this. And I could even see someone building tools on Hive that help out with evaluating potential website purchases.
I'm done. I've got things to do, and if you haven't gotten the gist of what I'm saying by now, writing more probably isn't going to help, lol. Anyway, it's just an idea, and I encourage you to poke holes in it and/or tear it to shreds in the comments. Hope you have a great day.
