Thanks Dave. I have covered all of this in great detail already and even spent a couple of months in the Value Plan private rooms trying to get the situation to change. I already pointed out to them that they drastically needed to improve the wording on the advertising and designs. They agreed but then did not consult me when actually putting the words together and so the new language on the rally car is barely an improvement on the old language.

Digital marketing is a well defined science at this point, however, the only people who really understand it are those who have studied it for an extended period and used it in order to generate money. This basically means that only professional digital marketers and some people at the tops of more successful organisations who work with them are going to be able to speak on this beyond their own opinion. I created the @strategizer account at the start of 2024 to introduce professional logic into Hive's marketing and put over a month of my time into preparing a proposal for the DHF to move forward with doing this correctly. Unfortunately, it seems to have been ignored by most big stakeholders and was only supported by about 33%.

In the proposal I highlighted the need to begin proper marketing with proper research and outlined a strategy for doing the research for a relatively low cost. Having a baseline of research data and defining marketing strategy allows everyone on Hive to understand where we are at and why we are there. This, in turn, makes decision making easier and sets a base for measuring success of marketing operations going forward.

In general, marketing operations must be measurable, meaning that it is unwise to run marketing campaigns if we cannot measure how effective they are. Without being able to measure this, we are potentially just throwing money down the toilet and, worse, even open up to being defrauded. Measuring the success of marketing campaigns on Hive is not so easy because there are multiple front ends that traffic could be sent to and no central way of collecting analytics data. This is part of why I have consistently also pointed to the need for the DHF to fund a professional onboarding platform that supports referral IDs.

As others have pointed out here (and as I have pointed out ad infinitum already) - there is no point spending a penny on advertising if the onboarding and retention are acting full of holes. Directing traffic to an un-optimised platform like Hive is akin to trying to fill a sieve with water - it is a waste of time. To repeat myself again, 98% of the people I have tried to onboard to Hive in the last 2 years have quit and most never even made a post - because their User Experience was too poor quality for them to be bothered to leave Web 2. Tech and crypto oriented people can mostly handle the shift from web 2 to web 3 social media (if they are ideologically motivated) but most other people just don't care enough to put up with poorly designed interfaces and a lack of comforts when it comes to data management.

Hive needs to accept that it's marketing has been consistently terrible, despite the many hours put in by people who are mostly unpaid (and unqualified). We also need to accept that marketing a platform of this nature is expensive, without some kind of genius creativity that perhaps creates new software that helps existing community members to better onboard people. The only system I know of like this is the one that @starkerz has pointed to me recently at SpendHBD, which lets community members use ACTs to onboard people and then gets them paid a continuing commission for the activity of the new user - this may not be entirely practical for standard blogging users though.

So in Summary:

1. Do proper market research and produce formal strategy based, partially, on the data.
2. Use findings from research to improve UX and user retention across Hive platforms - which means producing guidelines and other tools to help dApp creators achieve this.
3. Look at centralising analytics data for Hive apps to help all marketing activities.
4. Track retention levels in a public way and correlate changes to their causes if possible.
5. Design marketing campaigns that only focus on approaches which can be fully measured. Typically, businesses use Web 2 social media for this as it is very simple for them to do. Since Hive is competing with Web 2 social media and it is possible that the web 2 sites might even deliberately hamper or mislead the Hive marketing process, it would be wise to look elsewhere. There are various web 3 attempts to replicate the same tools for advertising that are found on web 2 platforms, so I would start looking there. I am not totally against running ads on web 2, but I wouldn't do it without a baseline of data from more open / transparent platforms to compare to... Otherwise, once again, money is being wasted.
6. VIDEO! It's shocking for me to still be saying this at this point, but to my knowledge we still don't even have the most basic of basic - high quality - promotional and educational videos for Hive. Why is this? I suspect it is because we do not have highly skilled and motivated people here who are good at making such videos and the budget has not been allocated to it. This is a huge part of the reason why onboarding is so hard. People generally (unfortunately) do not read much nowadays and Hive's selling points are fairly complicated - so video is a hugely powerful tool to help here.

I could go on to 10, 20 or even 30 points here - but I have already typed all this out so many times and it has yet to achieve anything, so I will stop.