Honestly I do like the Promoted Content concept and it seemed to be working early on in its adoption, sort of. To start most people throw their SBD away when it comes to promoting their posts. I see .01 here, .05 there, and even 1-5 SDB that will do absolutely nothing but get your post listed lower then it would be on the New Content Feed. So I just want to let however is trying to promote their post with these small amounts to just STOP, its a waste of your money, period. I was going to do a full statistic/analytic post about the promoted content page with a more in depth look then just earned vs spent (which really doesn't say anything) but I'll leave that on the back burner with the 100 other posts I have half finished, just keep getting side tracked. Speaking of... Anybody else want a post view counter? - Would help with seeing results...
Secondly who actually goes to that promoted tab? I tend to go there less and less and I'm sure I'm not the only one. The fact that users have to seek out promoted content is contradictory. Promoted content is just another form of an advertisement and should be treated as such, in a way. I'm not talking about all of the negative aspects of advertisement - irrelevant, annoying, in your face... when it comes down to it these are just posts on Steemit, which make them great relevant advertisement. So I think we should do much more for Promoted Content and actually get it seen by users instead of being shunned into a corner or tab in this case.
Potential Solution to both attracting more competition in Promoted Content, many more eyeballs, and increased potential post rewards would be to display the Top Promoted Content within all of the feeds on Steemit. Not unlike google and all major search engines promoted content (ads) are displayed within the regular content. We could go with the top position, like some do, or just have the posts displayed in-between every 10 posts on the feed or so. Here a little mock of where the Promoted Post would live on the trending page (Though I'm sure most of you could have just pictured it in your mind) I didn't bother to design something for this one it's more just to illustrate a point.
As you can see this would be anything but annoying or irrelevant. It wouldn't take away from the platform and would give these posts much more bang for their buck! At the same time this would drive up competition, which would up the cost, which would help with Steem prices in the long run. This is just some food for thought and would love to hear what everyones thoughts on it.
Blue