Alright, I've been meaning to write this post for some time now but have been quite busy with other things.
I'd like to start off with the elephant in the room. Sponsorships in terms of having "Hive" visible in places that primarily are viewed by "web2 folks". This is something that's been funded quite heavily from what I've seen from Rally Cars to a Handball stadium to athletes doing shows in malls, etc.
Now I'd like to first mention that I don't have anything against these attempts per se, this post isn't meant to bring these attempts down, but I believe it would be a waste to continue attempting such marketing efforts and I'd like to discuss what should be funded instead at this point in time.
The effects
Do you like ads?
Seriously, serious question. I know some people don't mind it, they are becoming quite more intrusive in this day and age. I had to unblock my ublock extension recently and noticed how full of ads youtube has become.
1-2 unskippable short ads in the beginning of every video, 1-2 skippable after 5 sec longer ads at the beginning of the next.
Clickable image links in the right hand corner of the video you're watching, on top of recommended/related videos.
As videos in between other youtube videos recommended to you with a small "ad" sticker in the corner.
Basically, they are everywhere and it's the major money-maker for platforms such as youtube.
Now, personally, there's very, very few ads I actually like and that is mostly if they're funny/unexpected or lastly something I'm actually interested in.
In the last few years the only time they've worked on me was when it showed me a mobile game I still play to this day and another time when Adidas was having a sale and I thought it'd motivate me to start working out again - no comment on what happened there.
Either way, I'd say for those few years what they got out of me was potentially $100 in total and aside from Adidas ads I never had to see the ad of that game again since google knew I already had it installed.
The rest of the ads? it generally annoys me to no end. I don't know what kind of effect they may have on my subconscious and if I may have spent more money in those few years without knowing that I may have gotten an ad at some point that made me choose this certain brand instead of another when going to the mall.
You can say I'm generally not the person they aim them towards. I often go out of my way to block them aside from say allowing them on #inleo as I know it may support the economy and users there to get adrevenue. If I didn't have ublock most of the time I would've probably spent at least 10-20h on ads the past few years even if I skipped them as soon as possible. So the return these companies and brands may have gotten from me being one of the people viewing them must be slim to none.
Now let me say this, video ads are probably the most effective ones.
There may be some others more effective than them, "hidden ads". If you don't know what that is, I guess I'd need a full other post to describe some I've seen where it's hard to tell if genuine post or just an ad, usually on Reddit and Twitter.
Other really effective ones would be "witty" ads, imagine comments at the right time and right place related to your brand placed on a high traffic tweet that gets traction early and is done well.
Why am I bringing this up? Because on the spectrum of how effective ads are, having the Hive logo along with a link to hive.io and some text of "fast, scalable, feeless, whatever other similar word" I'd say is quite down that list of efficiency.
Okay so let's get into a few examples I took some time looking into today after reading a post regarding VP funding. I admit I don't know all the details, I didn't do proper research on everything the funding of them "got" us, so forgive me if my assumptions aren't completely correct. Let's start with the $50k for the Portuguese Handball team of @cryptosimplify's efforts. At first glance what I believe this got us, was a banner on the wall of the stadium and one on the floor. Let's look together at their Instagram page and see when we find it: https://www.instagram.com/atleticaaguas_santas/
Alright, I spent like 10mins scrolling through these to look for an image where the logo was visible properly, and the first one I saw was on the ~52nd row with this image:
Now I do have to admit that you can see Hive as a footer on many images as well:
and again, I'm not trying to undermine this "deal", according to @cryptosimplify's posts they also showed Hive in different places like newsletters and of course the audience themselves will be able to constantly see this at the game with potential outside audiences too through streaming/television. This screenshot taken from a recent video on their facebook which seems less popular than their Instagram:
So what is my point?
My point is, why this?
Maybe I'm the outlier here who doesn't "look" at ads/sponsorships unless a small percentage of them somehow comes off as clever enough to make me research it. But let's say even if people go to hive.io who see our ad at this sporting event. They get to the site:
Then they are supposed to click "Join" which takes them here:
and even with what I assume is the best option out there right now, inleo's login/signup methods:
and once they login I assume they're sent to inleo's trending page:
Okay, so let's get back to the why.
Why a handball club? Why a Portuguese handball club?
What would make the audience of such events want a hive account once they get here? Do we have a super active Portuguese community? Do we have an active handball community?
Okay let's try post tags instead, hey here we go:
but how are newcomers going to figure out to type in /trending/portugal /portuguese /handball if most users here don't even really use tags anymore.
inleo next instead as I didn't mean to favor peakd over it, but since leo works on comments rather than posts I wanted to include that as well:
Alright so I'm really, really, not trying to be dismissive here, but even IF we had a crazy slogan or ad that wasn't generic that made people "WTF/WUT?/I gotta see this" and wanna check it out at all cost what are the supposed to find here when they get here if their origin is a handball stadium in Portugal?
Like I really have a hard time understanding the thought process of this being effective marketing. There may of course be additional things for the costs but unless it's direct onboarding with people showing them the ropes I don't understand how it would lead to active users/investors in any way.
Okay, I'm not going to go further into examples of other things VP has funded, some of them are similar while others may be more effective, it is hard to say. It's hard to say because 1. we don't have traffic data of hive.io, we don't have any way to verify if this data is legit and how much it resulted in new accounts to our front-ends.
So, what is a better solution and the point of this post?
Okay, so let's ignore web2 folks for now. I know Hive is simple enough to a niche of end users to figure it out by themselves even if they've never used crypto before but I don't think that at this time we should focus on them over other crypto users.
Hive offers people something close to no other platform/blockchain does. We are giving away majority of our native coin to folks being socially active, posts, comments, curation, "threads", pics, shares, videos, referrals and whathaveyou in the future.
Most of web3 is still stuck in web2 for their social activity; discord, twitter, medium, reddit, youtube, etc.
So the question is, how can we get them here? How can we make sure they get here and how many are going to stay? Well, the latter is hard to determine but I believe that spending money could easily help the first two questions.
There's tons of projects popping up daily, even if the big ones are out of our reach in terms of costs and "partnerships", we need people to determine the survival of some of the newer/smaller projects, how much they could value the social side of Hive and create lasting partnerships/giveaways/contests with them. A big focus would also be on immutability and transparency, if your project has things to hide, Hive may not be great for them because you can't censor criticism and important questions from the community here so shady projects will probably not have a great time here but if its only the users being nasty then they can use community-tools to mute and downvote them.
I don't like that I have to toot my own horn here again. I have to preface this with Hive being quite high in value at the time along with the project I attempted to bring to a community here. The marketcap/rewards/the giveaway may have had a big effect on the numbers, but at the same time this wasn't even an official partnership, just me putting my own assets out as rewards and onboarding over 700 accounts in a week to participate in it which lead to the community brimming of life for quite some time and many sticking with hive til now.
So imagine if we had picked a community with followers already introduced to crypto through ETH/SOL wallets who know the importance of keys, if they received $50k to host weekly contests similar to the way Vibes is doing things, onboard people, have discussions here, grow their own community, use voting power to bring hivers over to their community and introduce them to their product, etc.
I have no doubt that not only would this have a bigger effect but it would also have provable effect, we could see the results that money had and the people becoming active like we did with the Gods Unchained community:
Now I don't know how leofinance is doing when it comes to partnerships like this as that's what I assumed their proposal was going to attempt, but I think there's room for a proposal to run this in a smaller scale but with a wider reach. Starting small and then scaling up.
Blockchain solutions are there for almost everything web3 so I wouldn't be surprised if there's projects and people interested in all kinds of things which means there'd be some good collaboration options for communities already active on Hive to go out and look for web3 projects with followers and potential hive users to bring in. The important thing is that all the funding has to be transparent and these attempts at partnerships could start small but be provable by communities through their user activity and onboarding success rate.
I think that using certain onboarding tools and gateways would make it easier for our data analytics people like dalz to track them and showcase the effects of these marketing attempts which I have a hard time seeing how general marketing attempts of valueplan could produce.
Just throwing the logo and name of our blockchain out there isn't bad but we have to think that we're still small and can't afford to just sponsor what seems to be quite random clubs in hopes that people will look at an ad/sponsorship and figure out how to become a user and consumer of our main attraction we offer people: content, discussion, social activity, etc.
I haven't even delved into the attention aspect much in this post. We should have projects and brands out there competing to collect Hivepower to use it to get our users interested in their products when instead they spend it on twitter ads. This whole ad mania needs to be overturned but we have to start somewhere. We have to shown them that not only can our way of advertisement with voting power be more effective but also cheaper since they can re-sell the stake they've bought to use as advertisement/attention, but that we have plenty of stakeholders that will welcome those starting out and their followers for free to get the ball rolling.
Of course, there's a lot more to talk about this and ways to build a foundation so outreach to these projects can work as well as possible but I truly believe that being able to do crypto "sponsorships" directly rather than having to handle things through fiat and approaching users already familiar with crypto and keys would be way more beneficial to our userbase at this time and in the future than the things we've been trying so far. If and when we're doing way better we can go back to experimenting with "normies" or general ads/sponsorships to get the name out there, but right now is not the time and it'd be unwise to continue to dilute our stakeholders with attempts that not only don't bring in people but even if they did most would stop trying at the signup page or at the front-end without a middleman encouraging them to go further and become active to make it a habit to use Hive.
Anyway, just some general thoughts, I haven't put too much time into all this but I'd like to try a new small version of a proposal for this and see how it does if it gets funded, even if it does extremely badly we would at least have the numbers to prove how badly it did and could potentially improve from there.
Thanks for reading, again, this post isn't meant to undermine previous attempts so I'd appreciate it if comments wouldn't focus on that, I only want to showcase that there may be better options available that not only would put Hive accounts into the hands of more crypto-savvy people and eventually also encourage the staking Hive of the projects to maintain their attention/reach on our platform while more and more users would start using it.
Let me know your thoughts.