Firstly, before you say absolutely anything. This was a bit of a test as to what would happen if I put up a udemy course (paid) for months on end and then suddenly switched it to free and why this method could be a good way to get information out about the steem blockchain in a guerrilla manner, I’d love to find a way to track if this has an impact in signups as well, if you have a method that works for you please let me know!
before you get excited about the onboarding part.
First, let it be known that udemy has a problem, that problem being that they have not found a way to protect the course files from being downloaded, in fact, as part of their app they allow you to download the videos so you can watch them offline, free courses are literally being hoovered up and put on other websites, often then charged for by some corrupt script kiddie — but that’s fine in this instance, because actually, we just want the information to get out there.
I could not give a flying f__k that it might be distributed via BitTorrent, in fact I should have a seed out there for all things steem related, we all should, we should be in as many distraction economy eyeballs as possible if we want not only more people to sign up but to also offset the retention issues and the potential of running out of hashtags to deploy to denote a brand new culture shift every time we have a hardfork (tongue in cheek!)
#newwhayz
I kinda found this super interesting to deploy, put it out there as a paid for course and then just blam, open the doors, literally in hours of doing so in July it went mental, almost like they have crawlers scanning the site for new free courses so they can just farm them — in this instance, I was happy to do it because anything that puts a spotlight on steem the better! :)
As you can see it dropped down the next month but I still had a healthy hundred next month and then fifty something so far this month — and that’s the other interesting thing. As people take the course, thousands of them if you do it right, they leave ‘ratings’ on your content — there seems to be no problem them to make the free course PAID again, this then opens up the ability (although I’ve never done it) to have all those downloads, reviews and ratings on your paid course — people go on the reviews right?
the future of telling steem stories.
I’m changing tack a little bit with my future steem courses in that I’ll be looking at decentralized as a whole and not just focusing on steem as it’s evolving fast and the dapps that live on the edges are more interesting to me than the cult like core of a platform — the exciting, upbeat fun and spunky parts are always on the edges where the brand new, full of life, full of passion developers and brand new audience happens.
That’s kinda what the steem infrastructure course was about, just look at what’s available and running over here, it was a highlight reel more than a course to say look at what’s possible with the platform over here, I rarely seen dapp owners describing and detailing what tools they used to build out what they made so it hardly inspires people to come in and build the same, I wanted to highlight what was built here in the hope that people would look further — I’d always hoped that steem would be less ‘factions’ and more empowering but I’ve personally not found that. That’s ok too.
I certainly can’t wait to see what the killer steem app will be, I think we have yet to see it and when we do I think we won’t believe how simple it was and how much of a game changer it was.
Cheers!
__humble
pinterest epic wins pinboard → advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?
