A number of years ago, I embarked on a way to add extra value to the Steem Environment. There are a few ways that earnings can be made with this cryptocurrency. The easiest explanation of the process is that a person writes a post. When a reader upvotes the post, after a week both the writer and the reader get rewarded.
On other social media platforms, one way that they earn revenue is to show advertisements. Why not use the Steem as the mechanism to do the same. Banner ads are commonplace, why not promote the Steem community in the process.
Advertisers could pay for advertising space using Steem as the underlying payment mechanism. By doing so, it would establish support for the price. A currency's price is determined by its value to the people using it. For decades the US dollar has been strong because it was the currency underlying the oil industry. If a company bought or sold oil, it had to use the US dollar as the currency of exchange. By promoting Steem as the underlying currency for buying online advertising it would harden its prices in comparison to other currencies.
Another mechanism that was in place was how the reward system would work. The process would reward a person by viewing the page and by clicking on the advertisement opening up a new page. If the person viewing the page was a Steemian, they received 1/3 of the reward. The person who had placed the applet on their webpage (or were the Host on Steemhost) would receive 1/3. The final 1/3 was used to generate income to continue the maintenance and upgrades to the technology. If a non-Steemian viewed the page, the reward was split 50:50 between the "host" and the "developer".
Instead of paying in Steem though, the reward was in the form of Steem Delegation. This meant that it wasn't an outright payment of Steem but an encouragement for people to pay it forward (by upvotes). In essence, the Steemhost01 account would freeze the Steem coin that it held as it was delegated to others.
On a daily basis, Steemhost01 would generate its activity report. Despite the fact that the process was still in the preliminary stages, there were over 50 people were hosting the advertisements.
There were a few things that happened that eventually put a stop to Steemhost. One of which was the disappearance of a number of supports of the project. It wasn't that they no longer supported the project, they stopped posting on Steem entirely.
A second issue was the connection to the database. The price of maintaining the connection was 20 SBD per month. It was very difficult to justify maintaining the site with the loss of the people interested in the project. Subsequently, Steemsql, the method of connecting to the database has "disappeared". This means the entire process of connecting to the database needs to be re-written.
A newer problem is that the loss of Steemconnect. One of the stipulations that I had was the responsibility of validation and holding keys. Steemconnect used to be the ideal way of handling that. It too has "disappeared".
Do I think that Steemhost could return? It really depends upon people's interest.
