Subscriptions On Steem - Taking Donations A Step Further
I recently read @midlet cry for a donation function on steem front ends, and I think it's a great idea with loads of potential. It feeds into what is already being done on centralised platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Patreon.
Donations give us a new use case for STEEM/SBD along with leveraging a function people understand and use as well as providing authors with another way to receive rewards post inflation / 7-day rewards.
Donations are also a great way to get new money following into the steem echo system from various fiat exchanges or other cryptocurrencies if it was deployed natively and had the donations automatically converted to steem or SBD.
Having given it some thought, I had the idea that we should take it one step further and offer subscriptions as a native front end service too.
What are subscriptions?
I didn't quite understand it myself in the beginning, why were all these people on the internet giving away small amounts of money each month to random strangers creating content. As I took a more in-depth look, I began to understand it was a natural progression. The way I see it now its the market wanting more decentralisation and removing intermediaries.
Instead of paying your satellite TV provider or streaming subscription service, you're paying a creator directly for the entertainment or value you derive from the person.
How could subscriptions work?
The user flow as I invision it would be a user visiting someones blog and thinking hey this creator is awesome. I sure do enjoy their content.
I'm not too keen on holding STEEM Power to reward them with inflation or I don't know about this mechanism,
I would like to reward them with monthly contributions. I could click on their profile and select the option to become a paid subscriber and set the fee i'm willing to donate monthly to pay the creator.
Since we don't have debit orders the funds would need to be sent to a smart contract or bot that will execute based on the parameters set and remind users when they need to top up their balances to continue to reward creators.
Additionally the subscribers should be shown as part of the follower count as you can see my suggestion is in green. So a user and other followers can see who is supporting this channel and for creators to know who is willing to support them.
In your wallet you could have your monthly funds from subscribers shown so you know what your monthly income or lifetime income is from the subscribers willing to pay to support your content creation efforts regularly.
Managing your subscriptions
Then in my wallet I should be able to manage mu subscriptions, see the creators I've been subscribing to and supporting. How much I'm spending, adjusting my contributions and adding and removing creators I would like to support over time.
As creators stop creating you could also receive notifications to let you know you may want to stop your subscription since this creator has been in-active for some time.
Sucker them in
Steem has so many more functions than any centralised or blockchain based site but these tools are complicated. If we're going to get "normie" to want to use it, we need to sucker them in with things they know and understand.
Once we pitch them donations and subscriptions without any transaction fees, then we can unload the rest of the dog shit where we make some of the money, curating, commenting and powering up.
So anyway thanks for reading, please subcribe to support my blog if you like my content oh wait we don't have that function yet. Tabernac!
So what do you think Steemit? Yeah or Bleh?
Let's connect
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Before implemented and add new features is better to finalize communities and SMT.
This wouldn't need to be done on-chain, so it wouldn't be affected by those releases. Any of the front ends themselves could set it up in their own right
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Would be a nice feature for now we have @tipu subscriptions and I prefer the once of just !tip 2
LOL and clearly that means theirs a need for such a service but unfortunately the normies don’t know how to use their brains they want buttons to click! If it doesn’t have a GUI it doesn’t exist
The chain does not really need to implement it, so it can come from anyone. I am sure @cardboard could extend tipu to include more control and a ui since tipu has a ui although limited. You can then add better payment control and people can have these as options on youtube etc. Or as your example shows @steempeak themselves can implement this seeing as they are already parsing the transaction to then store in DB. So it all there maybe just needs a facelift :)
Indeed and even if you wanted some additional fancy shit that can be done using a side-chain. I think you could be on top something there with integration across all your social platforms too, but i'd be okay with just the minor facelift for now and see how normies take to it.
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This seems like a wonderful idea to take content creators beyond the 7 day pay window!
Indeed and it’s something creators understand and if we offer them a tool where they can migrate their content and audience and they have full control of their messaging and no transaction fees I can’t see why a superior product wouldn’t get them interested
I think it's a great idea. I've chatted in the past with peeps from #steempeak about it and it's definitely on their radar.
I think to take this to the next level we'd also need a method of users providing their subscribers with exclusive content. This would probably need to be a layer two solution where we could use some simple logic to determine if a subscriber has met the required specs to maybe download some other piece of content that's only available to subscribers.
Thanks for posting in Steem Think Tank! This is exactly the type of content I made this community for. :)
Yeah, I read about their plans to have a paywall set up for exclusive content and I feel that would be a further addition in your funnel as a content creator. That way the model has 3 options, once-off, subscription and then paywalled/purchased/exclusive content
Give the creators what they need to go out there and earn their keep and they'll bring the audiences with them
This is also one of the features LBRY has already. All stuff that Steem CAN do, but nobody has gone and done.
Well all we can do is bring these ideas forward and see if they take or not, both are sound models and I'm sure more people will see the value in it. Perhaps worth creating an SPS for it
Solid idea on this @chekohler .
Thanks! The more steemians who think it’s a good idea and support it the more sense it makes to push for it to be created
I think, a global service that is paid in fiat and then redistributing to all the upvotes of the subscription user would also be really nice to have. Similar as YouTube Premium does it, where a fee is paid that is redistributed depending on the watch time of the user. That would be a business rather than something built into Steem though. 😅
I also like your idea a lot and I'm sure it could be done.
That's not a bad idea either since it makes it even easier to redistribute your income without having to set specific users. I think your idea would have to be done on a side chain though and could be done on watch time/read time or upvotes. Also, these premium users should see no ads, which gives them another incentive to hold premium status
Somebody still could offer this service without having it on blockchain. They could create a database and a program which calculates the redistribution. I just like the idea of a service instead of blockchain to have the option to pay in fiat instead of crypto which makes it way easier to spend money. Blockchain is more solid to censorship or cutting off somebody from their revenue stream, I hope somebody will make your idea into a real thing. 👍
This is a great idea! I believe it will definitely help encourage Steem users to push out more content. Also, it helps bring healthy competition.
Exactly it provides a new revenue stream for creators, encourages the use and ownership of steem, brings in external cash and doesn't limit your contents earning potential. The more options we give people the more attractive it will become to switch from the centralised tools they use now. Give them what they know now, then give them what they need later with all the fancy blockchain benefits.
I really, Really like Your ideas! It would help everyone - which is needed.
The current situation (what I see after 100 days...) is that if no whales, or curation bots pick up your post, your lucky to make $.50.
And with the downvoters trying to take some of that back...
There has to be something else working for posters, especially as Steem (hopefully) continues to pick up popularity.
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
The upvote system is only there to redistribute the daily reward pools inflation so yes there is a monopoly on those who can reward you with their stake but it doesn't mean we should only have one reward system. Some would like to reward with their own cash. Say for example with this proposal you're willing to swap out your $10 Netflix subscription and then allocate that $10 to 5 or 10 creators all sending them 1 or 2 dollars per month. People can easily see if they can find, secure and get more subs to support them without transaction fees they can make a decent livelihood
And there You have it,
Yep the top is making a livelyhood,
The rest pretty much support it,
Like the "also rans" in a car race...
And I truly like it!
Only problem I see is "Steem Engine", which some will say is there for that purpose - more or less..
But personally, I Love It!
👍🏼😁👍🏼
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Sounds like a great idea!
Thanks, well the more peeps backing it who knows if could be a reality I hear steempeak is already has something similar in their roadmap