Quality content is the lifeblood of the internet. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and even social media posts are far more than a means to an end, or a way get more users for a product or service you’re trying to sell.

Engaging, fun, high-caliber posts that provide value should be appreciated and adequately rewarded for the value they provide to the people who engage with them.

Our Current Model is Broken and Needs to be Fixed

Technology has completely revolutionized the advertising industry. Paying over the odds for a quick, cheap, dirty advertisement is out and high quality, interesting, engaging content marketing is in.

More and more marketers understand the importance of drawing in an audience with high-quality content.

Many experts are suggesting that to get your audience to ‘do something for you’ – whether it is buying your product, using your service, or even simply signing up for your email list – you must ‘do something for them’ first. In other words, ‘give it away for free’.

There are many benefits to doing this, it surprises people, it makes them feel appreciated, makes them like you and it builds trust. One of the easiest, most effective ways to execute this is to create quality content for free. Unfortunately, while this strategy does have numerous benefits, it doesn’t come without its drawbacks.

Firstly, if the sole purpose of your content is to attract an audience – especially in the early stages when you’re going to great lengths to grow your business – you will have to churn out large quantities of content which will likely lead to heavy compromises on quality.

Secondly, providing followers with a significant amount of free, quality content disregards the inherent value of the content, thereby using it as a means to an end – as opposed to something that should be appreciated on its own.

Additionally, most of the content we discover is delivered through commercial platforms with their motives. These platforms can censor and manipulate content according to their own interests which can vastly hinder the number of people it reaches, as well as the rewards received by the content creators.

Blockchain is About to Change the Way We Reward Content Creators Entirely

With the rise of blockchain technology, the way users engage with and are rewarded for the content they produce is about to change radically.

Platforms like ASQ Protocol are creating a whole new decentralized content economy that empowers consumers, creators, commercial entities and partner platforms and allows them to interact with content in an open, transparent way while rewarding all members of the ecosystem with ASQ utility tokens in exchange for their contributions.

This new economy will allow content creators to maintain complete ownership and control over their content while exposing it to a wider range of audiences by leveraging partner platforms and even get rewarded for it.

Such a model is likely to benefit a wide range of different users – from small businesses who want to monetize their content, to B2B clients who can benefit from a wider range of content to individual users who simply want to gain more followers and grow their audience.

Decentralization is Coming to Every Industry

Content creation that’s changing – we are seeing a significant rise in the number of platforms that are aggregating content from all corners of the internet and storing it all in one place.

Red Pulse is another blockchain platform that uses a similar model to ASQ, although its purpose is slightly different. Instead of focusing on gathering content, it aggregates and analyzes data from Chinese markets.

By collecting information from its users and Chinese-language websites, it releases its research to the blockchain to provide a holistic view of the Chinese market and eliminate some of the bottlenecks that currently exist in research outlets.

Users who help to produce this research are rewarded in RPX – the Red Pulse token – which can be traded or used by research consumers to gain access to information that Red Pulse has generated.

How Can We Gain Mass Adoption?

One of the main roadblocks that are the most difficult to overcome when creating a new protocol is gaining mass-adoption of users. After all, there’s little point in posting your content on a website if no one will read it.

One of the key selling-points of ASQ’s project that helps it stand out from the crowd of other blockchain projects is its partners. ASQ Protocol’s first platform will be ASK 2.0 – the social question and answer platform with over 200 million active users from around the globe.

Their second is known as NING – one of the biggest and novel platforms for SaaS clients who want to build better social networks for their websites.

However, with the rise of the blockchain and the ever-increasing amount of content available on the web, it’s only a matter of time before getting paid for writing quality content becomes a reality.