![images (32).jpeg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQma14zTXqietwngtYF7cAYWBUiY8fhjyDyb1wZ5jEcFBya/images%20(32).jpeg)
[Source](https://www.letsgetjobless.com/blog-niche-ideas/)

Whenever I come across someone that publishes good content on the conventional sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress or Medium, I usually get the urge to tell them about trying to cross-post their content to a publishing platform built on a blockchain due to its inherent attributes that provide many advantages over such conventional platforms, with emphasis on immutability and censorship. 

This was way different from my approach 2years ago when I joined Steemit and told people to join likewise as to blog and earn. Over the time 
 such approach has proven to be counter productive, with people abandoning the ship when they just could'nt "blog and earn" as per their expectation. We even termed such approach #oldsteem. Though I like to admit that the "blog to earn" as a strategy actually worked in bringing "people" in. 

I've frequently thought about a scenario where all my content is on twitter or Facebook or Youtube and one day I woke up to find out that I've been banned or my contents are censored for some reason. It might not bother a lot of people but I think it will be a problem for others who attach a lot of value to their content, myself for one, my content represent a huge part of myself, my growth, my wars, fears, delights, doubts, discoveries etc. Loosing all that data will be very detrimental to my being. 

Before cloud computing became full fledged, data was much more susceptible to being lost. What most had access to were the hard storage devices attached to computers or built into  mobile phones, our pictures, videos, favorite songs, pdfs, word documents could be lost as soon as our devices got missing or corrupted. Then came cloud storage, an option to back up our data in cloud services offered by large tech companies. 

What cloud storage simply means behind all the technical hullabaloo that makes it function is that it is a mega data warehouse where data can be stored or hosted on the server maintained by the company offering the service.

 The Amazon AWS is a very common example due to its robust infrastructure, so is the Google cloud service, amongst others. These may have been major improvements in the way our data are being transmitted, but they aren't foolproof, infact there have been countless loss and misuse of data from these centralized entities we entrust our data to. 

![andy-hunt-tweet.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQme7iZC6XMFxideKvp9JtWmnk9ZLjGR4Vdrn7f2eoaSi9U/andy-hunt-tweet.jpg)
<center>[Source](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/amazon-aws-outage-shows-data-in-the-cloud-is-not-always-safe/)</center>

Without having to go any further technical, Blockchain has proven to serve as a better alternative yet, which shouldn't even be an alternative to Cloud but rather the next standard.

Comparing my former approach to the latter, people seem to be drawn more to the idea of "blogging to earn" rather than blogging for the safety of their data. I think every blogger who commits an ample amount of time in creating their content will be concerned about the safety matters of their content. 

*There are over 600 million blogs in the world today, out of over 1.7 billion websites. In the United States, there are over 31 million active bloggers posting at least once per month. And according to data from Ahrefs, people search Google for “How to start a blog” 121,000 times per month worldwide.*
[Source](https://www.google.com.ng/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://growthbadger.com/blog-stats-2019/&ved=2ahUKEwiF_9PR9aPmAhVOShUIHdALCk0QFjABegQIDxAH&usg=AOvVaw0sWQoHvngHOcfG7aMWVba_)

When Steemit is advertised as a *blog to earn* platform, the larger percentage of the invitees that latch on are not bloggers but mostly random people who want to blog and earn leaving out the tens of millions of real bloggers who already have an audience and their hard work etched into the lifeline on other various content hosting sites. 

What then will spur this shift or act as a wake up call to these conventional bloggers? 

1. A major catastrophe - Shadow banning usually don't occur en masse, until it does happen and half of the bloggers on Medium or Reddit loose their content. 

2. Ability to grow an audience - Majority of bloggers are attached to conventional blogging platforms because of the audience they've grown there over time, one thing bloggers want more than rewards is an audience. This makes me wonder if "audience" is as a result of the platform or the content creator. 

3. Ability to control your rewards - Do people really want to control their rewards? Youtube makes money, medium makes money, Reddit makes shit ton of money and pay their highest influencers. If people could control their rewards like on steemit will it make any difference? 

The most viable option seems to be the 3rd one as majority of content creators on other platforms are also concerned about rewards albeit secondarily or primarily. 

What Steemit offers bloggers is not just the ability to control ones rewards but also the ability to grow an audience and also incentivize them.

I think Steemits major limitation is that it is crypto based, but there's no other way these advantages will be possible without making the reward economy crypto based. 

Sometimes I tend to think Steemit came too early, it is very easy to overlook the solutions that Steem blockchain offers because a major catastrophe hasn't happened en masse in the world of content publishing. Eventually the shift will be inevitable, if 20% of the 600 million bloggers refuse to take this shift, then the world will watch the birth of another 600 million bloggers come to live ready and willing to accept the shift albeit slowly. This is the reality. 

As far as marketing Steem(it) is concerned, I think its up to every Steemian to do their bits in sharing of the information about what Steem offers, and bloggers - Steemit, where also dtube and/or 3speak also comes in to play. I can't imagine how more disastrous it would have been if Steem were to have been launched in mid 2020, so I can very much say that at this point its timing is perfect. 

*Whenever I come across someone that publishes good content on the conventional sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress or Medium, I usually get the urge to tell them about trying to cross-post their content to a publishing platform built on a blockchain due to its inherent attributes that provide many advantages over such conventional platforms, with emphasis on immutability and censorship.*

What's your approach as a Steemian? And if you're a blogger not on Steem, what's your take?