I noticed that Steemit has begun to show ads also to logged in users, too. That's because, yesterday, Steemit Inc rolled out a separate wallet application in what was called the split between the condenser and the wallet. The condenser is the web UI to the blockchain, that is, the trusty old steemit.com blogging interface into the Steem blockchain. Separating the wallet and the condenser apps has made it safe to show ads on the condenser.
Others have noticed it, too, and some have bemoaned the presence of ads inside the blogroll between individual posts. I've seen reactions expressing disappointment and annoyance. I've seen some people argue that since Steemit Inc has a massive stake, they should not resort to displaying ads to generate revenue but continue to power down and sell their stake only. At the same time, I don't think there is a single soul among Steemians heavily invested in the platform who would not welcome a high and stable price of STEEM.
Excuse me, but the whole idea that Steem could ever achieve a high and stable marketcap without generating external revenue streams from advertising and paid services denominated in STEEM or some other token on the chain that make use of the properties of the blockchain is, frankly speaking, retarded.
Steem is said to have doled out $50 million dollars worth of rewards during its three years of operation. Some of those rewards have been powered up but a considerable portion have been sold on the market. Where do you think that money has come from? The pockets of investors, of course. Who are those investors? They're Steemians who have paid real money with real purchasing power in order to gain possession of STEEM and Steem Power. Without any prospects of generating fiat revenue streams from owning Steem Power, other than those coming from other investors, buying STEEM with fiat and powering it up is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do except as a purely speculative play with the aim of fleecing a bunch of Greater Fools trying to do the same out of their hard earned money.
Let's not lose sight of what ultimately gives our precious Steem Power any actual purchasing power: present and future revenue streams from monetized attention on content on Steem and buying pressure from paid services payable in tokens on the Steem blockchain.
I don't find the scant ads on steemit.com anything to get worked up about. I'm actually very happy that Steemit Inc is able to generate some income from advertising. Why? Because it reduces selling pressure on STEEM. Thanks to the ad revenue, Steemit Inc is not forced to sell as much STEEM every month as it used to be.
Anyone who is offended by the ads is free to use some other interface. Go ahead and use eSteem Surfer or eSteem Mobile. But know that both take a cut out of your rewards as beneficiary rewards and are 100% justified in doing so. Why? Because eSteem runs a Steem RPC node (RPC = Remote Procedure Call) which is a type of Steem node Steem front ends are able to use to request information from the Steem blockchain and to broadcast transactions to it. Partiko does not take a cut, as far as I know, but it doesn't run an RPC node either. Running an RPC node is expensive. Guess who is paying for the transition from the RAM intensive Chainbase Steem blockchain software to the cheaper to run RocksDB? Steemit Inc. They're bearing the cost of that job in full. If they weren't selling ad space, they'd have to cover the cost of that and also running an RPC node of their own by liquidating and selling their stake, which would harm the entire ecosystem in the form of increased selling pressure and a lower price of STEEM. There weren't too many happy faces when DSound and Musing got their massive Steemit Inc delegations pulled. Guess what? The more Steemit Inc has to sell, there more delegations to good projects will get pulled and the more the reward distribution will be dominated by bid bots!
There are only about ten or so Steem RPC nodes in existence. The fewer there are, the more vulnerable our beloved blockchain is to denial of service attacks for one thing and the less secure it is in general. It takes MONEY to run one and ads will be the one of the main sources of revenue making it possible to run them in the future. Don't expect investors to keep funding Steem forever if there are no future prospects of revenue.