All about the #GooglyPrize
A general update and a brief review on the #GooglyEyes contest.
The #GooglyPrize has grown tremendously in the past few weeks and I am incredibly pleased to see this evolving into a seriously silly establishment on the steem blockchain. As the contest grows I feel now is a good time to improve and elaborate on it's organisation and core motives.
Let me start by giving you a recap of why and how this contest was started:
Launching the #GooglyPrize
to create engagement for a tag I was using all by myself.
I started bringing my #eyebombing hobby to steemit somewhere around May 2017. Even though I had been lurking on steemit since 2016, I had never engaged much with the community before that. Posting my #GooglyEyes was a lot of fun and I even managed to convince two fellow steemians (shoutouts to you: @okkiedot & @marty-art) to join in. But overall it was the usual plankton experience, hardly anybody saw it, upvotes were modest and engagement was close to none.
My next step was to look for every mention of googly eyes anywhere on steemit. I know many people have "a thing" for wiggly eyes and my goal was to let them know I was around and equally ecstatic about those Googlies. That's how I met @krystle. She had posted something totally unrelated but it included a googly GIF and the following sentence:
because everything is more awesome with googly eyes!
I quickly left an enthusiastic comment and without even knowing about the cash giveaway attached to the post - I had won 10 SBD just like that! The idea of creating a contest had formed in the meantime, and now I even had some additional funds to give it a little push.
That's how the first official award was funded and how @krystle involuntarily became the founding patron of this event.
Establishing the Prize and making my Mission Statement
Free money gets attention easily, but that wasn't what this was about!
My central idea for organising the contest was really just to bring life to the #GooglyEyes tag and to give fellow minnows and plankton a good way to post some original content and foster engagement in my own weird little niche on the steem blockchain. I had looked into many other contests on steemit and I came to the troubling conclusion that a lot of those were focused on their very own marketing and the profits generated for the organisers.
When running a contest on steemit, the organiser always wins!
I was eager to avoid this impression and after some discussions and research into the technicalities, I quickly developed my "100% Fair Prize Pool" strategy to give the award continuous growth over time while also making sure that all funds ever earned with curating the show would go straight back to the #GooglyEyes community.
Gaining Witness Support
The attitude and engagement this contest was able to capture didn't go unnoticed.
It started with @ausbitbank, he's @krystle's partner, so he was aware of the show from the beginning on. He immediately liked what he saw and he's been a major contributor to the prize pool almost since day 1. Soon later @reggaemuffin caught on to the show and he saw an opportunity to make this an even warmer place.
your contest is epic, it produces original content and quality one at that.
@reggaemuffin July 2017
And since then both @ausbitbank and @reggaemuffin are helping me to help them to help all of you awesome googlified steemians to earn great SBD prizes and receive Steem Power delegations every week.
If you want to show your appreciation for their generous support, you can support them, too! Show your approval for witnesses that actively engage in and support the community.
>> VOTE FOR YOUR WITNESSES NOW <<
Witnesses maintain the steem blockchain and it is important for the health of this platform that the community exercises their power to approve good players into the ranks of the top witnesses having the most influence over the technical aspects and game rules of this ecosystem. Each steem account can approve up to 30 witnesses.
Enough with the History-Lesson
I'll stop praising my accomplishments and supporters now
because you probably just want to know what's changing
and especially how you can actually win this thing.
How can YOU be a #GooglyPrize Winner
The "No-Conditions-Policy" applies since Day 1. No mandatory resteems, upvotes or follows are required! To make a qualifying entry to the prize just:
- get (or make) some #GooglyEyes
- stick them onto something (digitally added eyes are not accepted)
- take a picture (or better make 2 or 3 for better proof of authenticity)
- create a post with the tag #googlyeyes
- post original content & don't spam
I had to add the fifth bullet-point during the recent growth spurt as some users started submitting several posts daily, and occasionally trying to sneak in well shared old examples from other social media sites. Don't do that!
Since the contest runs recurrently and uninterruptedly, you can submit your post at any time. New winners are selected every 7-8 days and I usually curate new entries in the #GooglyEyes category at least daily. You don't have to register your entry anywhere else, as long as you use the required tag, your entry will be considered. As soon as you receive an upvote and a resteem by @googlyeyes you'll know that I have recognised your entry.
Entering the contest has been made as easy, barrier free and accessible to anyone as possible. But winning is becoming increasingly difficult as the contest and the number of entries continues to grow. So, let me try to explain the criteria by which I select the winners:
Judging Criteria
This was started as a simple #eyebombing contest but it has become much more.
The core principles of #eyebombing as a non destructive form of street-art are still the most important criteria for making a good entry.
- The #GooglyEyes should be applied to (and remain on) an object in a public area.
- No other facial features should be added. The object should "come to life" just by adding those eyes and nothing else.
- "Eyes-on-Eyes" are discouraged. Taking objects that already have an actual face and putting the wiggle eyes over it doesn't work for #eyebombing.
Now, since not everyone lives in a city and wiggle eyes aren't always easily accessible everywhere, I am bending the rules of #eyebombing a little bit.
- The use of "proper" plastic wiggle eyes is strongly encouraged. However, self-made eyes of any kind are accepted and as long as the entry is awesome in other ways, you still have a good chance at winning.
- Your Googly doesn't necessarily have to be in a public area. Any type of object, even household appliances indoors or your latest origami creation may be accepted. I still think it's a good idea to go outside and take a walk with curious eyes looking for a funny faces, though!
If your entry isn't following the classic #eyebombing rules or if you simply want to increasing the rating of your entry in other ways, too, there's a few more things to keep in mind:
- Invent some funky names and give your Googly a quirky background story.
- Use #GooglyEyes to communicate something, this could be about yourself or a topic that you care about.
- I love GIFs, great photography and weird randomness in general.
- I admire exceptional creativity.
The #GooglyPrize is a contest not a lottery, quality always wins against quantity. And since this contest was created to build a community, I'll probably also recognise if you are actively engaging with your fellow Googlyistas.
The Prizes: SBD and SP Delegations
The #GooglyPrize awards 100% of it's post rewards on the Winner Posts.
60% of the SBD-pool are paid out immediately in each upcoming winner announcement, 40% are used to pre-fund the subsequent award (this helps smoothing out spikes and dips in post rewards). SBD prizes are awarded in three tiers of 30%, 20% and 10% of the SBD pool. Usually there will be one winner per tier, but due to exceptionally large prize pools or my own indecisiveness it may happen that multiple winners per tier are selected and the prize money then get's divided accordingly.
Additionally all SP gained through the award posts are going into a continuously growing delegation fund. During each winner announcement one of the winners will be selected to receive a delegation for one week. This selection is not related to the quality of the winner's entry but to his account data. As this part of the prize aims to further strengthen the community, the delegation gets awarded to a winner with a limited SP balance of their own and a favourably low self-voting quota.
So far the #GooglyPrize has been able to pay out a total of 408.390 SBD to all it's previous winners and on top of that has additionally accumulated a delegation fund of 216.999 SP to-date.
So What's Changing Now?
Actually, not very much!
But as the contest grows I will try to make it more independent from "whale-support", more maintainable and also more transparent.
So far 40% of the SBD-pool have always been just sitting in my wallet waiting for new winners. I will now start using this money to buy votes for the previous winners post through @minnowbooster. This should actually have a net-positive effect on the prize pool and will help to further increase both SBD and SP rewards for the contest.
It is important to me that this happens transparently, and it's probably the main reason why I am making this lengthy post today. I will start this as an experiment on the current winners post and I will give you detailed updates including full balance sheets of the prize pool in the future!
Incentivising Contributions to the Prize-Pool
In other words, making it more attractive to upvote the winner announcements.
First of all, the paid votes for the announcement post as mentioned above will be made at a minimum post age of three days. This means everyone who upvotes the post within the first 72 hours will get their proper share in curation rewards for this vote as well! I will make the first purchase for the most recent announcement in a few hours, so if you haven't voted there yet, now is the time. ;)
Second of all, I have registered @googlybot. This bot will monitor who has been upvoting the announcements and will soon start distributing small random upvotes to those contributors. Kind of like a #GooglyPrize loyalty rewards program, this bot will function similar to my other recently launched cuddle-bot @steemkitten. I still have to tweak a few things but I expect to launch @googlybot after the #GooglyPrize Issue No. 30 is out (~in 2 weeks).
Making it easy to Follow the Contest
Do you want the full flood of Googlies or just the Announcements? Yeah, you have a choice now!
If you follow @googlyeyes your feed will contain all valid entries to the contest. Now I understand that's maybe a bit much for some of you, but if you really want the full package of googlyness, that's still your channel!
And now there's also @googlyprize. This account will only resteem relevant #GooglyPrize Updates and Winner Announcements. All #GooglyPrize Posts since it's inception have been resteemed here, so the @googlyprize blog also serves as an easy access point for looking into the previous winner announcements. If you are curious, pay a visit to @googlyprize.
That's all for now
As if that wasn't enough of a wall of text already, right?!
I am @fraenk.
Stay googly my friends!
bonus image:
The first GIF made with the now iconic #GooglyPrize trophy
everything is better with #GooglyEyes
Do you have Questions or Critique?
Roast me in the comments!
Want to talk more directly or just hang out with nice folks?
Join Planet Googly on Discord!
I've never entered your contest, but I just want to say thanks for having a contest that does not require resteems, upvotes, or follows!
I am incredibly pleased with your acknowledgement! The conscious decision to NOT use these kinds of conditions was very important to me from the beginning on. An "honest" contest should never come with such strings as it kind of tells that the motivation for the organiser comes from something other than the content!
Maybe you'll show us some Googlies on your homestead one day?! I'd love that!
It is good to see how googlyeyes has grown so much and has greater visibility in steemit, your contest has always been very generous and transparent. Thanks for keeping him alive.
It is an excellent idea to promote the post of announcement of winners, with purchase of votes, has two points in favor, and are the rewards in curatorship for voters and acquires even more visibility.
Regarding profitability, I promoted a post mine and at the date of payment I even lost because the value of the post decreased. While another post did win some surplus because the values went up. You never know what's going to happen.
And ... than the googlyeyes live, there's always a lot of fun there.
Thanks for your support @samic! I agree there is some risk involved with the paid votes due to the market fluctuations. The votes by @minnowbooster however usually come with a return of more SBD than spent AND additional SP in the rewards.
Of course, if the USD value of STEEM would completely tank in the next 2 days, we do see a risk of losses. According to y calculations: if STEEM goes below ~$5 we will start loosing a little SBD in the cash-pool (but we'll still have gained SP for the delegation pool). Steem would have to go below $3.5 before we would make actual net-losses. I think that's a very acceptable risk.
Either way, I don't think of this as a permanent solution but more of an experiment. I'll publish the detailed results of this in a post after the rewards have been processed.
Also if the #GooglyFamily should decide they don't feel comfortable with paid votes, I'd stop this experiment asap.
Amazing stats, it's been a great journey and enjoyed every single week since I joined this lovely and creative family <3 Thank you and witnesses for everything again, Steem on!
One Love, One Family, #GooglyEyes Everywhere!
You have a small but really nice googly community. And I hope it will grow more and more)
Thank you @artz,
I will say your awesome contest listing posts have most likely helped contributing to the growth lately!
to be honest you have every reason is a silly contest as you say, but through the contest we have a very large society and I already feel like family publishing your crazy eyes thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to enter this society
@googlyeyes
That's wonderful! I really hope this can be a warm place for many more Googlyistas to come :D
This helped clear up some random thoughts I had and forgot to ask. Also help you not have to answer so many questions for new contestants I will add some of these rules and link back to this in my next entry to help spread the word.
Thanks mate! Spread the Word! Share the Love!
I read and upvoted this post a few days ago, it's awesome reading through #googlyeyes history (and being shout-outed-to, thanks!) so I'm still a bit hesitatant to post a comment... :)
Seeing how #googlyeyes has grown is just plain awesome - amazeballs as you would describe it! It's what you've made out of it, so kudos! Even if, back then, it felt like
it sure was fun enough for me (joined June 2017) to join along and get some traction going on steemit. I didn't keep up (life, you know), but it's the one contest I'm looking out for every week, even I'm not participating anymore! (But I'll be back!)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: kudos to you for putting in the effort, week after week! Even if a copycat would try to take this over, I bet they'd quickly go bananas because of the workload. And even with that you're giving away every last penny of it. #Googlyon @fraenk!
(I was going to post a pic of a new #googlyeyes - but it seems I forgot to take that pic, and they're already on their way to you... I hope they're still stuck on the painting... Let me know, ok!?)
Going to the mailbox definitely made my day today. My neighbours probably thought "what's that crazy guy up to again" when they heard me squeaking in joy and taking pictures of my mailbox.
To be honest, I did expect you to put some #GooglyEyes in there, I expected them somewhere on the packaging actually. I would have been almost disappointed if you didn't include any... hehehe... but where you put then and the fact that they'll stay right there to live on with the many other Googlies at my place... perfect!
Now what I didn't expect was to find Lucius in there, too! OMG @marty-art... you're the best!
It would be awesome to see another Googly from yourself for the prize, too. You did kind of send me a serious bribe already today... but hey, I'll stay neutral... you can't corrupt me! But since you're an avid story teller and you've got a curious eye, you'd probably ace this either way anyway.
Haha, I didn't expect the package to arrive this soon, I only put it in the mail last Friday, awesome you got it so quickly!
Yep, the googlyeyes on the painting were going to be my next entry, but I checked both of our camera's and guess I forgot to actually make a pic :P
Glad they stuck through the packing and shipping, hahaha! My first thought was to stick them to the back but they would never be visible, to to the side they went :)
And, yes, Lucius is yours too, man. For the record, and for the blockchain, I had to rig that contest so you were the winner, as I knew Lucius was heading your way. So feel free to write it at the back: Lucius, the Daydreaming Beachcomber from Skull Island. And I here apologise to the other entrants: this was destined to be your victory.
But no more rigging from now on, and I don't expect any from @googlyprize either. Just a pic for the blockchain would be nice, as it seems I just... plainly forgot to take one :D
hahaha... what... foul play! heh... I'll just pretend I didn't read that part.
And yeah... I might actually make a post to show off my latest art acquisition. I'll let you know when/if that happens ;)
That would be cool, but don't feel obliged! I really should've taken that pic myself, feel kinda bummed by it :-/
If you do, include your pic of my googlyeyes for uhm... whose entry exactly? :P
hah... you wish... nah, I'm not letting you off that easy... go make your own entry and it better be a good one :P
but I will dedicate a seldom blog by @fraenk to you, maybe tomorrow, I have to hang it up first.
Allright, fair enough about the entry!
I'll now bring an extra pair of googly eyes in my pocket just in case :)
that's the spirit!
I love GOOGLYEYES!!
and the #GooglyEyes love you back!
I have my entry ready
I'm holding my breath ;)
Thank you @googlyeyes for refreshing the rules.
Yeah, I thought it would help to clarify some things.
Thanks for being around @isabelpena!
Apoyando siempre el buen trabajo y esfuerzo de personas con ideales excepcionales. Suerte en este nuevo proyecto en mejoramiento y fortalecimiento del concurso amigo. Cuentas con mi apoyo.
¡Gracias! Todo lo mejor para ti, mi amigo.
I am so happy to be able to enliven this contest, thanks @googlyeyes
You are the jealousy baffoon... mind your own business.. don't peek into others accounts. I know you are the one who paid steemcleaners to downvote my post.. This platform is for everyone, not just for you. i am free to do anything i like. And more over You are not the father of googlyeyes /eyebombing idea. You are the copycat too using someone else idea and making tons of money. Before pointing out others, look at yourself first
I have made another post for the contest.
https://steemit.com/eyebombing/@haejinfans/the-eyebombing-contest-1-win-sbd-weekly
No matter how many times you pay others and downvote me, I keep posting.
I know that you will flag this comment too.
" DON'T FLAG IF YOU DARE TO". Let your followers know what you are...
that's kind of cute :D let's rewind:
an update 20 comments later: I've removed the upvotes, this pointless back and forth completely blocked the "normal" comment section, sigh.
And about:
I never claimed to have invented #eyebombing, but at least I know what it actually is and make the effort to produce at least two original photos for each winner announcement and to curate the tag several times a day while putting ALL proceeds right back into the contest... so much about "making tons of money".
Money is not what this is about... but looking at your little foolish attempt to start "your own" with mandatorily required upvotes follows and resteems... I guess that's really all that you want, eh?!
If you dint liked my entry you could have ignored it. Atleast i had put some effort for what you so called a fake entry. (Though it's not. ). It has nothing to do with other posts i make.
You are doing this for money... i repeat it 100 times. even I and everyone here are doing it for money.
"Actually I make an at least two original photos for each winner announcement "
I can also put 5 photos of same object every week in different angles (just like you do).
And I am not as rich as you that's why i ask them to resteem and upvotes so that i can give them back as rewards.
I did ignore it! I didn't flag it or anything. I simply ignored it.
What I don't ignore is when you blatantly rip-off this contest.
you are the one who started by flagging my post first with jealousy...
umm... certainly not with jealousy but probably feeling a bit upset that you rip off my beloved #GooglyPrize contest, yeah...
I do think that's a legitimate reason to use a downvote!
what did i do to your contest ..? you are the one who started downvoteing my post.. that's why i replied in your post,
Do you have any copyrights, so that only you must run this kind of contest. If you dare just compete, Don't do silly things like this. I don't have time to argue with you whole day.
I did nothing wrong with your googlyprize contest, posts or your blog.
People understand who is jealous and doing all these.
You are trying to crush me down by using multiple accounts to downvote.
Don't edit and mislead the comments after my replies..
Indeed I edited the comment to add links and correct some spelling/wording. Luckily we are on the blockchain and everyone can check IF those edits were "misleading"
see for yourself here: phist.steemdata.com
thanks..but every one is not intelligent as you to know about all these tools...
Yeah, I understand that you are not the brightest bulb in the shelf.
I too understand that You are the brightest bulb in this steemit community..
https://steemit.com/googlyeyes/@emily333/googlyeyes-puffito
Congratulations @googlyeyes! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP