Dcontest - a cure for Steem

Introduction

I have once heard a maxim about Steem Blockchain:

Come for the rewards, stay for the community.

I think the true understanding of our platform lays in these few words. All of the efforts that we make here - using bid bots, resteeming services etc. - are essentially intended to bring bigger audience to our content. The basic value of Steem Blockchain are not the rewards, but the communities and connections between people.

Content promotion - current problem

Currently there are basically three methods of promoting content on Steem Blockchain:

Bid bots - many people do not like them, because they allow poor quality content to get a high value of payout. Unfortunately, this is often the case, so the times when payout was an indicator of the post quality have already passed. Obviously bid bots still work, as being on the trending page significantly increases a chance of being noticed, but many consider them as a kind of fraud. Additionally, they do not guarantee an engagement under your content, so results may not be satisfying. Just look at the trending page - there are plenty of posts with hundreds of dollars of payout, thousands of votes and just a few comments.
Resteeming services - many of the followers of resteeming accounts are inactive, sometimes even fake. Additionally, they usually have no limits of resteemed content, so their followers simply cannot engage with every publication. From my experience using them is disproportionately expensive to the attracted audience.
Promotion service on Steemit.com - this method is really unpopular among the users, mainly because of its inefficiency. Content is displayed in the "promoted" section, but there are not many people browsing it.

A lack of Steem - current problem

As we are currently facing bear market in the world of cryptocurrencies, many newcomers and smaller users are leaving Steem due to unsatisfying rewards and insufficient Resource Credits. They are not provided with any solid source of income, which could help them to grow on the platform.

Our solution - Dcontest

We would like to introduce Dcontest - a DApp that is intended to solve the problem of content promotion on Steem. Dcontest will provide benefits for the certain groups of users on Steem:

For Plankton and Minnows - a daily source of Steem income and a possibility of participating in fun contests.
For Dolphins, Orcas and Whales - a new way of content promotion that ensures attracting a real audience and genuine engagement in the comments.

How it works?

Every day we are going to promote one Steem post or DTube video. Participants will have 20 hours (since the contest was published) to predict what will be the total payout of the promoted content after the first 24 hours. After that they will have to leave a valuable and original comment related to this content.

Rewards distribution:

A person with the most accurate prediction will earn the main reward - at the beginning it will be 0.5 - 2 Steem (it will depend on the engagement in the previous contest). Rewards are going to increase as Dcontest becomes more popular.
Every participant will get 0.05 Steem as a participation reward.

Our business model

In order to maintain the daily contests and pay out the rewards without any delay, we have decided to implement a few source of income:

We are going to run ads on our website. All advertising revenue will be intended for the rewards for our community.
We count on the upvotes from our community. We are going to publish two posts per day (first for the new contest announcement and second for the winner of the previous contest announcement).
Initially we are going to run our promotion service for free, in order to promote Dcontest among bigger users and create a solid base of participants. After that, we will run paid promotion service, which is intended be the biggest source of our income.

Paid promotion service

We would like to avoid the bid bots approach, so we will not offer a promotion in return for a single Steem payment. Instead of that we would like to create a kind of subscription service and offer a promotion in return for a Steem Power delegation. The tariff is as follows:

Delegated Steem Power	Promoted Content
1 - 100	1 promotion every two weeks
100 - 200	1 promotion every week
200 - 500	2 promotions every week
500 - 1,000	4 promotions every week
1,000 - 5,000	6 promotions every week
5,000 - 10,000	7 promotions every week
10,000 & above	please contact the owner