Wait! I've been here a year!? Looking back on one year of Steemit

Obligatory One-Year Post 

According to Steemd.com I created my account on June 28, 2017.  I can here, as many of us did, via @stellabelle.  I saw her posts in the Choose Yourself Facebook Group.

I was fascinated by the idea that you could get paid by simply blogging or posting.  I was here before the very first payout.  If you weren't here for those days, those were some exciting times.  

Will it work?  Will it pay?  How do we get our money out once it pays?

And lo-and-behold it paid.

I even Tweeted about it.

I am not a whale.  But last summer was amazing.  

I never ever really hit the trending page.  But so what?  I still cashed out over $4,000 in July.  I was getting paid for reposting posts from my own blog.  Occasionally, the early posts wouldn't make anything, then suddenly I would make several hundred dollars on a posts.  In those days, you really were very dependent on getting the attention of the whales.

Several hardforks (and that was a new term to learn) later, and those days of completely random whales seem to be over.  It seems you can develop a following and pretty much have a range of where your posts will end up.  If you look at people's blogs you can see a fairly consistent payout develops.  That's a good thing, I think.  It forces you to work on developing a following.

$4 Steem

Yes.  At one point Steem was trading at $4.  (Back in my day....)

I was new to Crytocurrencies, so I didn't understand the pump and dump nature in the early days of a coin.  When Steem was trading for $4 and the interest rate on Steem was so high, I honestly thought I would have made more money on Steem interest than I would have made at my day job.  I even did the math in a post.

Obviously that plan came crashing down.

Changes

I've seen a lot of changes over the year.  I remember struggling to even getting a picture uploaded to Steemit.  I remember when the first reputation score came out.  Then it was on a simple 1-10 scale.  I remember @stellebelle was the only one with a 9.  For some reason, I scored an 8.  At 68 now, I'm high in reputation, but not at the top anymore.

Remember getting paid only 12 hours after a post?

Or 30 days after a post?

Remember inflation so high you could refresh your wallet and see new Steem Power.

Yeah, good times.  Good times.

The Descent

Like a lot of us here saw the price decline steadily from $4 to 7 cents in March.  Seven cents.

During that time Steemit was a ghost town.  But I still kept posting, my thought was even though I wasn't making hundreds of dollars on a post anymore, I was making some money, which is more than none.  I did once go for three weeks without posting.  I think that was more of a day-job-is-too-busy sort of thing.

And during that time, for whatever reason @ned upvoted a lot of my Star Wars photography posts.  Which was nice to see.

The Climb Back-up

For whatever reason, the price of Steem responded a few months ago, and therefore the community seemed to come back.  I've watched several people who have not posted in months are now back.  Which is good.

My Needed Power Down

Unfortunately I had to power down for awhile.  I needed some extra cash to help pay some bills, and the only way to get that kind of money at the time was to Power Down.  I was once at 12,000 SP.  But that shows the power of Steem, Steem actually created cash that I could use.

I'm not there now at 12,000 SP.  Sad-face.  But even still, my fully powered upvote is somewhere around $2.90.  Before that the best I had ever gotten was 17 cents.  

I've learned to be thankful for what I have as opposed to what I could have had.  I will eventually have 12,000 Steem Power again.

New Experiments and Revenue Streams

I discovered that I could use Steemit as a way to serialize books that I had written.  Not only did that give me another revenue stream for that title, but people would actually download the book from Amazon.  Very cool.  

Then I decided to write a book first here on Steemit and then publish it later.  I did that with Irving Williams and the Mystery of the Lighthouse Ghost, an I got an excellent response on that book.  Maybe I'll do that again this summer.  It was a lot of fun to do!

The Future looks pretty bright

Steemit is becoming a larger and larger revenue source for me.  And for writers, artists, and content creators it is a wonderful place.

Here is to many more years to come.