Whenever people talk about HIVE there are a couple of topics that come up, mainly how much one HIVE is worth in fiat, and the platform/infrastructure.
I am a big fan of the developer-friendly side of HIVE, and like most people here I now try to not think about how much money I am in the red by investing in the currency.
Lately though, I have been thinking about how HIVE is basically an F-tier crypto currency in terms of reach and value, and why I think looking at it in terms of crypto rankings, and in particular conversion to US dollar value, under values HIVE.
I've said many times before that if this platform was NOT based on crypto, it would be performing much better.
Look at Medium. The CEO has taken that platform from "promising but struggling" to thriving. There are some excellent publications on there, so much so that I was paying to subscribe until I trimmed back all my content consumption due to overwhelm and lack of time.
Is Medium better than HIVE? No, and in fact I would say HIVE has some technical advantages.
Substack is another example of a platform that is making serious coin but has issues. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement similar features on this technical infrastructure but nobody will because the money is not there if you are tethered to a forgotten crypto currency instead of something people want to earn and spend.
Want another example? Check out the Ghost CMS. In many ways it is a competitor to both WordPress and Substack, and has been doing great, especially since the inter-company/personal drama in the WP community kicked off.
At its foundation, however, it is just a blogging platform with some nice added features. We have that here.
Going more old school there are sites such as Tumblr, Blogger, and even Reddit. They don't have capabilities that are not already present or could be easily here. They make money through advertising mostly, with some other schemes such as add-ons etc.
Even on Twitter there are people shit-posting and making $$$, some of them in five and six figures, mostly people making less than $100, but that is still way more than you can make from creating content on HIVE unless you have some wealthy benefactors in your network.
Let's face it here if I post and someone votes I can look forward to around $0.30 at the current exchange rate. The exact same content on my WordPress blogs makes a lot more, and that is without accepting advertising or sponsored posts. That is a DIS-incentive to post here!
My solution to this last issue was to create a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish here first and then long term get the value by reposting onto your public blog.
But why not accept USD on, for example, Peakd? You could allow people to have an ad-supported experience or pay to remove ads. Medium allows you to have content gated as premium for paying readers only, much like on YouTube or Patreon.
Heck, have you heard of Skool?
People on that platform are making a lot of money, there is nothing there that can not be done here.
I am just saying we can think of HIVE as content and community, it doesn't always have to come back to "crypto line goes up"!
Maybe there is not the appetitite within the larger HIVE community but one of the sub-communities like LEO could do very well taking this different approach.
What do you think?
