Lot of really great info in here, thank you for sharing. My question is, what is the best way to get developers to actually show up and build cool stuff here once we have the ideal and most attractive fabric in place? As you know, "if you build it, they will come" doesn't always hold true in the tech world...
Also, what do you think about implementing ads on the hive.blog front end and then using that ad revenue to purchase HIVE on the open markets, putting a little demand on the markets?
Other than that, thanks again for sharing your ideas on this. I had just recently been wondering what the roadmap for HIVE might be as well, so this was very nice timing! :)
I was already complaining a lot about traditional ads flying around.
It's risky (find a flaw, inject code in ad, deploy to all Hive holders as a service, harvest).
It's annoying (well, like most of the ads)
And it's not that common on the Internet these days.
The only case I know where attention is paid to classic ads is when my ad blocker does it to get rid of them ;-)
A way better approach is to show people that instead of paying for classic ads, they can brag about their products or services directly on the platform. They can engage with the community, gain influence; power up their HIVE. That could be mutually beneficial.
IMHO few bucks from some random scammers being able to advertise their scheme on the Hive frontends isn't worth it.
Applying more visibility to those who set @null / @hive.fund as a beneficiary is a far better approach.
Those are all excellent points against monetizing ads, I think.
I agree that just having the best tech isn't always enough, but it's an important first step when trying to attract developers. Unlike investors, it's hard to lure developers with promises of future functionality, they usually want something they can use now.
We'll definitely have to market our platform too, and there's many ways we can do that: publish white papers, press releases, post about the benefits on developer sites, and directly approach promising projects. Anyone on Hive can contribute to our marketing efforts in some of these different ways.
But perhaps the simplest thing is to enable our existing dev base. We actually have many developers on Hive now, so I'm focusing my own team's efforts towards easing the development process for those devs.
Regarding the "ads on hive.blog" idea, it's a theoretically attractive idea, but I don't think it makes sense to pursue it now. We already have a good idea how much revenue it will likely generate, as Steemit already tried it, and when I weighed that revenue stream versus the opportunity costs of developing and maintaining an ad platform on hive.blog, I decided that the opportunity cost was too high right now. But if there's another team that wants to take up the task and is willing to do any wheeling-and-dealing to find and keep advertisers, I wouldn't be opposed to hosting the ads on a trial basis.