Micropayments & Micropaywalls | The Future of Earning Rewards on the Steem Blockchain?

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ICYMI, the Leoshop that we’ve been working diligently on for the past few months just launched yesterday. It gives anyone with a Steem account the ability to buy & sell digital products on the Steem blockchain.

  • Reviews are stored on the blockchain.
  • Product descriptions are stored on the blockchain.
  • Payments are conducted on-chain.
  • An escrow system is even used for buyer/seller protection.

There are a lot of facets that make connecting an online store to the Steem blockchain an incredible tool for Web 3.0.

This is all just the beginning for Leoshop. Version 1. The first step in a 1,000 mile journey.

Micropaywall Content

I was talking with a well-known Steemian a while back about micropaywalls for content on the Steem blockchain. I’m forgetting the exact context, but I’m pretty sure it was @tarazkp on one of his posts relating to the subject.

I’ve had a few other similar conversations about micropaywalls and how they can (and should) be used to boost your earnings as an author. On Steem, our ability to do this has been limited or nonexistent up until yesterday because a simple tool didn’t exist yet.

With the Leoshop, I’d love to see authors on Steem setup micropaywalls for some of their most valuable content pieces. Imagine if your favorite Steem author/vlogger/podcaster created a “premium” and “exclusive” piece of content for you to consume at the cost of just a few pennies.

It could be a blog post with extra juicy details in it, a section of their upcoming ebook, an extended version of one of their latest podcast shows… you name it.

The beauty of Leoshop is flexibility. It can handle a lot of variety. It’s a simple solution to a long-term problem that authors will always have on any website — how to increase their revenue as a content creator.

There are many people on Steem who post incredible content. They earn upvotes for that content, which are like “tips” on the blockchain. Why not go beyond that and offer an even more exclusive level of access in exchange for an insanely small amount of STEEM, SBD or LEO?

I already have a few ideas for how I will personally use micropaywalls to offer some exclusive content to Steemians who enjoy my blog posts, trading logs and Steemleo show podcast episodes. I think there’s a lot of potential in this use case and I’m curious to see more people dive in and try their hand at monetizing the attention on their Steem blogs.

The Steem Blockchain Couldn’t Be More Perfect For This

Steem offers:

  1. 3 second transactions
  2. 0 fees
  3. Scalability
  4. Community
  5. Connectivity

Steem has everything already in place to make micropayments easy and hassle-free. If you do a quick google search for micropayments and cryptocurrencies, you’ll find a bunch of articles that talk about the future potential of using Bitcoin and other cryptos for micropayments on content. There are some smallish issues with that though — fees, tx times, scalability, etc.

On Steem, we don’t have to worry about any of that. The future is now. Micropayments are already here and any author can take advantage of them.

In addition to all of our scalability and transaction benefits, we also have the immense advantage of community and connectivity.

Tell me, what other blockchain has an internal community like Steem? A group of hardcore individuals from across the globe who all share some common interests. A group of people who, by simply entering their username on a site, can login with Steem Keychain and instantly buy & sell products on Leoshop or switch over to Splinterlands and trade some cards or even login to Leodex.

We are perfectly positioned to make this kind of system work.. today. So if you’re an author on Steem, just try it out. You probably won’t make $1 million from selling products on Leoshop, but who knows… you might just find a sizable bump in your daily earnings on the blockchain from sharing the content that you already love to create.

I’ve reached out to some content creators on other platforms who have yet to jump onboard the Steem blockchain. Not everyone wants to take the time to cross-post their content to Steem, but I am absolutely sure that some of them will want to monetize some of their more “exclusive” content by adding it to the Leoshop. Then, all they have to do is login to Steem and claim their earnings from sales.

Who knows, we may even convince them (over time) that branching out and building additional brand awareness directly on Steem is a good business move. It’s all an ecosystem and it all works synergistically. Today, I heard back from one author in particular who said he already has an exclusive piece of content that he’d like to list on the shop. He’s relatively well known on sites like Seeking Alpha but has never seen nor heard of Steem before. So it will be interesting to see what kind of response he gets with this micropayment-enabled piece of content.

Posted via Steemleo



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Yep, I beieve that both of these things are going to be increasingly used for content access, and SMTs can do the same with much more sensitivity than other payment options. Free transactions are perfect for someone to charge an account and then pay micro access of varying prices to say for example, a newspaper's content.

I have talked about this a few times, but the other day it was in regards to the likes of Netflix, HBO and Disney who are trying to compete on content package, when the audience is going to demand much more than the range on offer and pay-per-view or perhaps more precisely, micro-pay-per-view.

I also see the podcasters like Sam Harris jumping aboard the model in time as he is someone who doesn't want adds because of their manipulative nature, wants people to have access and, still wants to earn. SMTs and Steem with free transactions is a brilliant option for a huge range of content delivery hosting.

Thanks for the mention btw :)

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100%. I'm even listening to this set-in-the-future sci-fi book on audible that just mentioned what is essentially micropayments for watching x amount of hours worth of a livestream.

I would love it if Netflix, HBO and crew switched to that micro pay-per-view model. I'm paying $10-$15 a month for like 7 different streaming networks lol

Posted via Steemleo

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I would love it if Netflix, HBO and crew switched to that micro pay-per-view model. I'm paying $10-$15 a month for like 7 different streaming networks lol

This is why they don't want to. If they do, they would have to compete on individual pieces of content and unfortunately ,most of the package is trash. As I noted in the original article I wrote, it is much like risky debt bundled into A-rated :)

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With Leoshop, I think the SBD to USD peg becomes much more relevant again. Hope we can fix the peg soon :)

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Yeah it could be nice to have a stable-coin underlying the shop. I was even brainstorming a stable-coin SMT that Steemleo could launch and use on the shop... who knows. For now, it allows users to exchange STEEM/SBD/LEO for the current exchange rate on products but there is definitely the issue of volatile prices -- if STEEM rises by 50% tomorrow, and someone buys a product... their purchase of the product is "50x cheaper" in a sense than the person who bought it yesterday

Posted via Steemleo

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Wow what a fantastic development.

I am looking forward to getting more details and coming up with a strategy that would apply to my blog, or the evolution of it.

Have you thought of having the store carry services as well? Like consulting via requested reports or articles on specific subjects?

I am also thinking I we could offer digital marketing services to online businesses or entrepreneurs or blog monetizers from our company @town-crier.

Man you do some good stuff and I am glad I followed you those years ago!

Posted using Partiko iOS

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It's pretty fun to work on it. I hope to see a few things up there from ya!

Yeah the shop actually has the option to upload a "Service" category product. You can choose that in the "Add a Product" screen on the site.

Marketing services would work great on there as well. The shop uses a 7-day escrow system -- which means that buyers & sellers can dispute charges within 7 days of a purchase. For services, this is extremely important. It makes sure that a seller of a service can't skimp out on delivering the service they have promised to the buyer.

Posted via Steemleo

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To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.

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I am loving all the possibilities that are emerging. We are truly entering untapped waters here.

There is so much that can be done with this shop.

We are going to radically alter the ways people are rewarded for their content.

Posted via Steemleo

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Absolutely. I think the future looks bright for these avenues of monetization for content creators.. especially on Steem

Posted via Steemleo

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One very important feature IMHO would be the ability to "Unlock with vote" for Whales, Orca and some Dolphins. This can become an additional reason to own and stake more SP. There is still the risk of being downvoted by some jerk. You could even make it a Pay $0.10 or vote $0.24 type of system.

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That's definitely interesting. It's a more sustainable tipping model and can work in conjunction with the model I described above as well (as the one above pertains more to downloadable content paywalls)

Posted via Steemleo

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Hi, @khaleelkazi!

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