Hive is fundamentally a token distribution mechanism and so is every second-layer app built on it, including LeoFinance. No content is capable of earning longer than a week. Content that is no longer active is no longer visible on the front ends save for a few pinned posts. I'm not saying that the front ends should be showing a whole lot of old content. But old content may still be valuable. It also keeps piling up making its cumulative value grow all the time. Yet, the token price does not reflect this at all on Hive, which brings me to my next point.
The only value capture mechanism on Hive is the accumulation of stake affording the user a larger share of the total inflation. But that is ultimately a zero sum game because that share of the inflation could've been going to another user instead. The value of the total is equal to the value being captured by the token.
HIVE has many trading pairs against BTC thanks to its exchange listings. This is overwhelmingly the greatest source of value for the token. There is speculative demand for the token. There exist about 200 million liquid HIVE about a half of which are stored on exchanges. The owners of this part of the total supply control the price of the token. About 170 million HP is powered up. This part controls the inflation. The problem is that without irrational speculative demand, the token is doomed to perpetually fall down in satoshi price. There is a good chance it will explosively appreciate during a general bull market top like STEEM did almost three years ago. But that is not a given.
Peakd has a handy tipping functionality as part of it UI but based on how infrequently it is used, this cannot be said to be a very relevant part of value capture on Hive.
This option is completely ruled out for on-chain content unless it is encrypted. That does not sound workable for on-chain content. It would be off-putting for regular readers. Thus the encrypted content only available for paying subscribers would have to be hosted elsewhere.
Some Hive front ends display ads but as far as I know, the front end owners pocket the profits without the token price benefiting at all from the ads. LEO is the only token that has an ad revenue buyback and burn program. LeoFinance.io is the only front end that does this. But this is somewhat altruistic an activity as all posts created using that front end are shown by also by the generic blogging front ends, which they can monetize through ads without participating in the LEO tokenomics in any way.
What's missing is the ability of the users to place ads in their own posts (at the bottom) to directly monetize their own posts old posts. There are some purists who would't want that because they feel it would diminish the value of their posts. Nothing wrong with that. But without value capture there is no way for them or anyone to benefit financially from their work. Others say denounce the advertising sector as something pernicious and seem not to want to do anything with it. This option leaves speculation as the only value capture mechanism - with the exception of Resource Credits being afforded by Hive Power being in such high demand owing to mass adoption that the value of HIVE would have to significantly rise because of that. But there is a catch to that. Without a way to reward users for creating high-effort evergreen posts, there is much less chance to attract a large number of readers out of whom a significant percentage would want to each pay for a small amount of Hive Power to be able to transact on chain.
Every website out there has an ad program. It is healthy and normal and it is the main value capture model for attention of the Internet and will remain so even if tokenization sees massive growth. Ads can be relevant to the content being displayed and quite effective even without privacy invasions.
