With all of the holiday activities, I somehow missed this article that was published ~2 weeks ago by NASDAQ. Great, short read here:
A few quotes from the article:
The rise of the cryptocurrency comes at a time when publishers and content creators are struggling to earn any money at all in online publishing - and new revenue model is thus long overdue. Between 2000 and 2015, print newspaper advertising revenue experienced a shocking evisceration, plummeting from $60 billion to $20 billion, according to The Atlantic .
The problem does not stem from the fact that readers don't appreciate the professional news industry (even if it is widely criticized ) - it's that publishers struggle to monetize online publishing . And while publishers were busy trying to get print advertisers online, Google and Facebook ate their breakfast, lunch and dinner to the tune of a combined 63 percent share of all online advertising. Whatever value might have been left for publishing websites has been further decimated by the popularity of ad blockers.
Meanwhile, the online publishing industry has also become financially problematic for writers and other content creators because many websites like The Huffington Post expect writers to write for exposure in lieu of money .
Steemit is trying to reverse these trends using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, first with its own social media site and next with Smart Media Tokens. On Steemit.com, content creators post on a Reddit-like site, and they earn cryptocurrency whenever the community responds well to a post.
