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

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@khaleelkazi
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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.

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.

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