Is the concept of ‘valuable content’ subjective?
Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
No, the concept of valuable content here on Hive and layer-2 communities such as leofinance.io is NOT subjective.
I’m seeing a worrying theory being accepted as fact here on Hive.
I want to make it clear that the concept of valuable content is NOT subjective.
In this post, I take a look at the role content plays for the value of HIVE crypto, as well as the plethora of layer-2 community tokens such as LEO.
What role does content play for the value of HIVE?
Let’s start by talking about HIVE.
As the governance token for our decentralised Hive network, HIVE itself is different.
With stake being required to conduct permissionless transactions, HIVE will always see demand.
Deriving value from decentralisation, a far and wide token distribution is all that matters.
Thus the blockchain itself smartly incentivises high volume, low quality content to keep the distribution of inflation flowing.
It doesn’t matter what content is churned out, just that something new is always there.
To the blockchain itself and thus for the value of the HIVE token, there is no difference in publishing 10 blank pages per day to a 5000 word, SEO structured evergreen blog post.
Hive itself doesn’t monetise content and thus doesn’t care about quality or its ability to make money.
But with the ability to monetise content on the Hive blockchain via Hive’s tokenised layer-2 system, this is where you should be incentivising the latter.
What role does content play for the value of Hive layer-2 tokens like LEO?
As I said at the top of this post, the concept of valuable content is NOT subjective.
Content either makes money for the publisher, which in this case is the community owner who is in control of the domain publishing the content, or it doesn’t.
The idea of layer-2 tokens community tokens is that the community owner can use them to pay users for valuable content, which they monetise by driving traffic to and selling ad space around.
While it may be okay for HIVE itself if you churned out 10 blank pages a day, community owners are not going to be able to drive any traffic to this sort of content.
Hence incentivising readable content with the highest chance of driving ongoing traffic is the smart choice.
The reality is however, that not a single Hive community monetises their content in any way shape or form.
They all create tokens and then use ongoing inflation to pay users for content…
…but they don’t actually monetise the content they’re paying for and as such never drive any value back into the token.
What we end up with is endless printing of tokens to pay for worthless content and no reason for new investors to buy the endless supply that will be inevitably dumped.
If your community is paying you for content by printing a token, but doesn’t monetise that content, then I’m sorry.
Your token is going to zero.
Should you buy LEO?
So is LEO any different from the rest of Hive’s layer-2 tokens and therefore should you buy it?
Short answer is right now no, LEO is no different.
But to provide some hope, I’m writing this from the perspective of a LEO investor who is trusting that Khal is actually monetising leofinance.io content via ads and safely storing that revenue.
Revenue that he promises will be used to buy/burn LEO.
Personally, I do trust that this is the case.
And am therefore speculatively investing in LEO now, for when this becomes reality.
Whether you should buy LEO or not comes down to whether you trust Khal is keeping the revenue he’s generating via ads served to readers on leofinance.io content.
And that this revenue will eventually be used to close the right now completely unbalanced inflation supply/demand loop, by buying/burning LEO off the market.
If you don’t want to trust this is the case, then dump all your LEO tokens and stop reading here.
While you’re at it, it might be best to go and dump the rest of your layer-2 community token dogshit who in many cases are even paying people to publish evergreen content on leofinance.io with their own token.
Yep, mind blowing.
What role do LEO investors play in driving value to the token?
While community owners, in LEO’s case Khal, have full say over monetising their community’s content on the domain, investors do have a say over the distribution of further inflation.
As such, those with stake have a massive responsibility when it comes to incentivising other members of the community to create the type of content that is valuable via curation.
Your goal?
Driving maximum traffic, generating maximum ad revenue and the highest number of LEO tokens bought back/burnt as a result.
Therefore helping the price of the token you’re invested in go up.
Literally the only thing that matters when it comes to content from a layer-2 perspective.
So now tell me this.
Why on earth would you as a LEO investor with stake - including Khal’s massive accounts using funds from the pLEO, bLEO and wLEO bridge contracts… but hey, that’s a whole other kettle of fish - continue to incentivise content that doesn’t make your investment more valuable?
Not only that, but in the case of upvoting content published from other front-ends, actively detracts value from that investment.
I just don’t get it.
Stop incentivising content that doesn’t drive revenue.
The only way to change people’s behaviour is to incentivise it.
As LEO investors charged with distribution, you are in control of this process.
What type of content makes money and therefore is valuable for LEO?
In the end, it all comes down to this for LEO investors wanting to incentivise the type of content that will increase the value of their investment.
Remember that right now the only way that LEO can generate ad revenue to be used to buy/burn tokens dumped on the market, is via ads on the leofinance.io domain.
That means that any content being published or shared using a link to any other domain, yes even other Hive domains, have zero value to LEO.
As such, those with LEO stake curating it is akin to McDonalds managers paying people to work for KFC.
Consider how many page views and therefore ad revenue, is going to be generated from a piece of content?
We’re in a tiny Hive bubble so even though a post might be getting 50 comments from those of us already in the community, in the grand scheme of things this isn’t enough to move the needle.
We need to look outside the bubble.
Does the person you’re upvoting have an external social following that they’re driving back to leofinance.io via that piece of content?
From my time here, I think it's safe to say we have a grand total of zero users with a Twitter/FB/email following big enough to make an impact.
So what is the type of content that will generate the most ad revenue and therefore is most valuable for LEO?
Well structured, evergreen pieces of content that rank on Google.
The domain’s SimpleAnalytics page clearly showed that Google traffic outpaced even the second most popular referrer 10 to 1.
It’s all that matters and should be all those of you with stake, incentivise via your upvotes.
For both of our sake.
Furthermore, keep in mind that copy/pasted content from other blogs such as personal domains and Publish0x blogs will see their versions indexed above the leofinance.io version and therefore are as detrimental as content published via other Hive domains.
You’re paying them in LEO to generate ad revenue elsewhere.
Don’t do it.
Final thoughts on the concept of valuable content on Hive and LeoFinance.
The bottom line is that LEO investors need to incentivise the type of behaviour that is good for your investment.
By doing so, you will quickly see people stop posting worthless garbage because they will no longer make money doing so.
As a fellow LEO investor, I'd highly encourage you to join me in changing your curation behaviour with this in mind.
Best of probabilities to you.
PS. Yes, I fully see the irony of this post earning LEO upvotes.
Do with it what you please.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
This is something to really think about. Gotta re-examine how we do our own curation especially on threads. I do keep in mind those who are constantly selling their LEO and try to not upvote their contents even with my meager vote value, lol! Ironically, it is often observed that some of those are still being incentivised generously by big stakeholders and their trails.
On the other hand, there are those who share other links from outside of the LEO UI but are keeping their stacks and powering up. They are in my opinion some of those better to be supported.
The other kettle of fish you mentioned do make me wonder at times.
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It's all about trying to get to a point where the ecosystem is sustainable.
If the LEO token (or any Hive community token) can't sustain new authors selling the tokens they're being paid to generate content, then it is unsustainable.
This is why generating revenue from the content those authors are providing, and then using that revenue to buy/burn the token, is key.
Once the ecosystem sustainable, then it doesn't matter who is taking profit.
To get to this point, it's up to those with stake to incentivise the type of content that generates the most value (ad revenue).
Do share your thoughts!
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Yeah, was to edit my comment yesterday after realizing it was far from what your point was but it's already there so I let it be😁
Cheers😉
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From my time here, I think it's safe to say we have a grand total of zero users with a Twitter/FB/email following big enough to make an impact.
May I jump in and just state I have pulled in some massive views on Leo posts and when doing my interviews with chains continue to drive Leo to a recognised brand.
There's been a few posts written about engagement and hits and I believe one of my Leo Posts took top spot last year for hits.
Okay, I was maybe harsh with my assessment of social.
I know you, jk6276 and even Khal himself have been doing some great things on the social side.
Kudos :)
The bottom line is that we want the same thing - Drive traffic to the domain, generate ad revenue from traffic and use it to buy/burn LEO.
With the ultimate goal of seeing the price of LEO going up.
Traffic is traffic.
For ad revenue to increase, it doesn't matter how it gets to the domain, just that it does.
So I just want to encourage those with stake to better incentivise behaviour that drives traffic.
Upvoting content with good SEO structure or from users with a strong social game both work.
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I don't think there has been much Leo burning going on? It is hard we want people to do the work but the chain doesn't have the value behind it. As many know to do a good piece of work takes a lot of time and resources.
Also important to note for those big pieces I still didn't break anywhere near where some of the shit post accounts do. Instead I got scorned by many.
Talking a good 3 - 4 hrs work for $10
This is something that is highly overlooked on Hive but you can't really blame people that much. Most of the curation is automated and content discovery could be a lot better but it is what it is...
Everything Dane mentioned in the article is completely opposite on Hive. Instead of encouraging content that drives traffic to Hive everyone upvotes Hive-praising stuff the most. It's counter productive and makes no sense but it is also an interesting phenomenon to observe.
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I agree mostly. Problem is that there are maybe 15 to 20 real value posters . Leofinance is currently way too small to remove or de-incentivize all the
shitpostersothers. In my opinion, as a startup, one needs to be less strict.You and dagger212 are right that there needs to be balance.
We don't want to make the place entirely robotic.
There's always going to be a place in any vibrant community for shitposting and fun.
But if those with large stake want the value of their investment to go up, they need more content that drives traffic/ad views to the domain.
And the best way to do that right now is to financially incentivise the type of content that will generate the most traffic.
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Exactly, and that requires more manual (or AI-helped) curation. But the opposite is happening. Autovoting perpetuates always the same authors regardless of the value, true manual curation is time-intensive and AI algorithms we can´t afford (or can implement technically).
While I agree with the facts you've laid out in what will ultimately give LEO value, I disagree with the whole "only vote for people adding value to Leo" bit. I would argue that even though those people are siphoning off some of that value to other places, they are still adding "value" to the platform in other ways. Intangible ways.
I started writing my rationale here but it got very long so I just made it a post of its own here.
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Cheers for the excellent reply!
I'm really happy to see that we do have stakeholders here that care.
I do agree.
All that matters from an ad revenue perspective is traffic.
And having a vibrant community of people doing different things is certainly going to contribute to return visitors.
Hopefully moving the revenue needle over the longer term.
But I still stand by the fact that the most effective way to drive the price of LEO up, at least in the short term, is for those with stake to incentivise SEO structured content.
Lots of the highest paid authors here can write.
They just need to be financially incentivised into writing the type of content that will drive the most traffic and therefore help price.
Heck, they should be on board because their salary goes up!
PS. I see you've been linking to the Hive LeoGlossary page that wants to target the keyword 'what is hive'.
That's a super tough keyword because its so generic, but when you add words to the end of it like crypto, we actually already rank.
(Google 'what is hive crypto').
By now continuously trying to tell Google that it should be instead prioritising this younger, less authoritative version, we're doing more harm than good.
This is called 'cannibalisation' in SEO because we already rank and now we're just eating our own ranking haha.
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Explain. I don't understand this SEO stuff very well. But I'm pretty good at understanding when people tell me what to do. lol
What about the other Hive crypto out there? How do we differentiate from that? That's why I thought we'd want to make What is Hive to go to phrase since that is probably what most people will ask. Is that not true? If you say we're kind of starting over with the What is Hive link, wouldn't we still want to get that to rank? Hopefully it will be easier when thousands more users join next month with the new Leo UI. :-)
Actually, I see we now actually rank for 'what is hive':
It's down on page 9 lol, but it's there!!
Yiiew, win.
Google is going to only rank 1 leofinance.io page for that term.
Better to focus on the one that already ranks rather than starting again and trying to cannibalise that ranking.
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I was going to post a comment relevant to this post, but you can guess what happened. So I'll publish it as a stand-alone post instead.
One of the points I was going to make was driving traffic to the
leofinance.comdomain as much as we can.In my case, there is older content I had published at other Hive domains which I had referred to on occasion; I can rectify that by publishing updated posts here.
That still leaves the sticky issue of image hosting (currently, not at
leofinance.io). I have an idea for handling that, but it may not fly with the dev team or with ownership.Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The way that Khal is going to get the token price to go up is to generate ad revenue off content on leofinance.io and then use that revenue to buy/burn LEO.
The idea is that these buy/burns will eventually outpace inflation emissions of LEO being paid to new content creators as rewards, and as such, supply/demand will push price up.
So all that matters is driving maximum traffic to any and every page on leofinance.io.
Just gotta figure out whether doing that would generate ongoing traffic for leofinance.io?
Would Google rank those new pages that you re-published, or would they view them as copies of content that is already hosted on another domain and indexed by Google?
Remember, unlike the value of the HIVE token, the value of the LEO token doesn't come from decentralisation.
All that matters is that Google indexes the leofinance.io page and therefore the traffic views ads.
Where the images displayed on those pages are hosted, doesn't have a huge impact on SEO.
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To go with what Khal is doing, I can publish content at LeoFiannce first and delay posting at my domain for, say, a month so that search engines have enough time to pick up
leofinance.io.Posting updated versions of pre-LeoFinance content eligible for posting at LeoFinance will give the new content the
leofinance.iodomain, which means search engines will pick them up. The earlier content was virtually invisible, so the newer versions should be more useful for theleofinance.iodomain.As far as how Google ranks the newer pages, I would add enough updates to make them bona fide new pages. Newer H1 and H2s should help, too, since originally I didn't know much about SEO.
If images don't have much influence on driving traffic to
leofinance.io, then I won't sweat it. Even so, I would still try to find a non-spammy way to get them to drive traffic toleofinance.io.Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I understand the strategy of supporting content producers who generate Ad revenue by driving traffic to Leofinance.
My question is how would this work for the average curator?
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In our system of stake weighted voting, the behaviour of average curators doesn't really matter.
It's only those with larger stakes that have the power to truly influence the type of behaviour that is beneficial to price.
Put it this way.
If people no longer make money shitposting or being lazy with their structure, then they would quickly change this behaviour to continue getting paid.
Those with larger stakes need to be the ones to incentivise the type of behaviour we want to see if change is going to occur.
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How do we determine who brings traffic to the site?
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You want to know what would increase engagement on Leo?
"Content Recommendations"
I talked about it in a post in the past, it's either my post was lost amongst others or people weren't just interested, but I can say that a handful of people saw it.
The only way you're going to gain more page views is to build an in-page feed that recommends more contents for users as they read, probably based on topics tags and authors, with little focus on the authors to ensure that content visibility is more broad.
If possible integrate some push notifications to send notifications directly to users on their devices as contents hit certain milestones on Hive to be considered of best quality for such audience.
I believe that may require tracking, but it could be integrated in a way a user can choose if to get tracked and thus sign up for push notifications or not.
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