Cross-post me please!

No, I am not begging.

However, I find the possibilities of @steempeak's cross-posting feature very interesting, as it is something that is heading toward the pathway I have predicted for a long time that doubles-down on the earn as you consume potential of Steem. Yes, earning on curation is one thing, but what is likely more lucrative in the long-term processes regarding the scaling of Steem, earning by sharing is the way forward.

While I know that the SteemPeak team didn't create this for earning potential at the core, the future of sharing content across communities for reward is looking good. What this means is that influencers and platforms with valuable followers and user base, will be able to earn a portion of the rewards on the content of others, while curators will still get a reward too.

While the original poster might get a smaller cut than previously, the cost of distribution through a portion of the rewards can allow a poster to get a foot into audiences that they might not have had access to otherwise. This is especially true when it comes to diverse communities and potentially "content aggregators" that for instance, build mobile reading materials like Flipboard and similar.

No only that, because each share will generate a new instance of the post, it can essentially keep a valuable post earning residuals for years to come, and possibly quite significantly. For example, my most resteemed post is a Steem post on the SBD debt ratio with 80+ resteems and most of those resteems were outside of the 7-day payout window. Potentially, in the times it is relevant, people would be able to cross-post it to the places they frequent and revive it to bring relevant information to their community, earn a little for themselves and attract a little for me also - as well as potentially expose my work to new audiences.

Now, this is where the evergreen content (timeless, always relevant) really starts to be able to earn both income and exposure, as the content that is valuable across time can be spread over and over, further and further. This also means that viral content like memes would be able to be distributed far and wide with incentive to do so.

While this is only really looking at the Steem pool for earnings, an SMT can be used to track these cross-post/resteems/reposts etc wherever they go, and can create a great deal of feedback metrics for their spread. Introduce interoperability for instance, with the TRON blockchain and communities and the potential to get a lot of eyes on an individual piece of content and still have value past the 7-day payout for the author is high.

What I hope that this kind of system would encourage is content creators to start producing the kind of work that is shareable and valuable for consumers, the type of stuff that an influencer could spread and their audience will be accepting of it and spread it on further. Over time, Steem content becomes highly socially contagious as not only is the content decent, there is financial incentive to push it through the networks and social incentive to not abuse it as those who do will lose the trust of their audience and therefore, their influence.

This innovation and its evolution is going to empower communities by being able to pull in the best and most relevant content for their userbase by paying automatic royalties to the poster. And because Steem has free transactions and can handle the volume, the potential for thousands of communities to share millions of instances of posts is valuable. And valuable for all involved.

An audience will get good content, the distributor a cut for pollination and the author a flow of income streaming in from all over the world from people and places unknown. With a shared wallet for Smart Media Tokens and a market, there could even be an automatic "Trade" function that converts unfamiliar SMTs into something that is useful, which would help with trading volume and liquidity, as well as creating demand on the tokens that the world values.

While in its infancy, the possibilities for this feature and new use cases for it to build valuable content experiences is enormous, and I am excited about where it could lead. Not only that, it has always been the goal that Communties and SMTs will be the earner for content creators and this is a very good example of just how this will empower creatives.

With all that has been going on, I wasn't expecting it to be introduced quite yet, so this release by the SteemPeak team is a fantastic surprise. While some might not see where this leads, this has the potential to be one of those developments that is a game-changer, a seminal moment and the grandparent of a whole branch of innovation to come.

It might take some time, but the empowerment of users is the future of Steem, no matter what kind of user group they belong to. There is always an upside on Steem.

Taraz [ a Steem original ]