A major touchstone within the media space has been the exploration of new business models. At current, the ad-based mechanism for making money has fallen short in many respects. It can incentivise sensationalised content to generate clicks, for instance. From a marketing perspective, current models also promote the buying of “likes” or “upvotes” rather than authentic market interest.
Crypto does offer some alternatives to this. At UFOstart, we have written broadly about a number of these alternatives too. In the following post, however, we’ll dig into Steemit’s upcoming Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) project. It is similar to an ERC-20 token, but with a laser focus on content creation.

More importantly, it aligns with our vision of a more equitable media landscape, from marketing to journalism and everything in between.