One of the common questions about LeoFinance is how to determine the intrinsic value of the LEO token. Ad revenue plays a central role in the long-term mission of creating a sustainable economy that generates a rising intrinsic value for the LEO token, its hodlers, the content creators and the curators who participate in the platform.
Tracking the growth of LeoFinance's ad revenue is one of the most important economic indicators within our ecosystem. While the ad program brought in a small amount of revenue at the start, it has continually grown since its inception (around September of 2019).
In 2020, we've seen a massive climb in the ad revenue we generate each day. This has been directly related to a rising user base and token price alongside our general traffic (unique visitors who are non-Hive entirely) dramatically increasing.
Last month, we reported on our ad revenue for October generating 31% of our entire ad revenue for the year - showing a great indication of our exponential growth.
This month (November), we've seen our growth sustain itself. Rather than see a massive spike up and then a subsequent downtrend in the ad revenue, we've seen new highs being met sustainably.
We brought in almost the same amount of ad revenue this month as we did last month. The total numbers tell a story of how our ad impressions are continually increasing, but there were less users who clicked on ads coupled with a slightly lower CTR. Our CPM this month was considerably lower than our CPM last month.
Note the 10% growth in impressions generated (230k last month to 256k this month) but the lower CPM ($3.12 last month to $2.26 this month).
I'm sure other community members will comment below/make posts about what the community can do to raise our CPM ;)
Alexa Ranking
It's been fun to track the immense growth in our Alexa ranking as we see nearly every metric for LeoFinance on an explosive upward trajectory.
Alexa Ranking From the September Ad Report:
Alexa Ranking From the October Ad Report:
Today's Alexa Ranking:
Daily Revenues and Impressions
Our average daily revenue is continuing its upward growth trend. This month, we averaged $22.73 USD per day.
As indicated in the totals section (above), our ad impressions are on the rise. Increasing by 10% month-to-month with an average impressions per day of 8,286.
Site Traffic
LeoFinance operates 4 main applications:
- LeoFinance.io
- Hivestats.io
- LeoDex.io
- LeoPedia.io
Hivestats used to be one of the primary drivers of ad revenue and traffic per day. We had nearly an entire month of downtime for Hivestats due to the hardfork and some of the data routes we used were not properly updated. After seeing these marked as "low priority" by Hive devs, we decided to investigate a workaround so that Hivestats would work once again.
It took some digging, but we managed to find a viable solution in the interim until the data feeds we use are properly updated. Hivestats went back online in mid-November. We saw a continual decline (as Hive users realized that they weren't able to utilize the site without the data feeds) until this fix was implemented.
After the fix on November 11th, some of the user base started using Hivestats again. We saw a jump in traffic and it has been slowly increasing again, but we are still averaging about 50% of the traffic that we used to get prior to the fork. As more users realize that Hivestats works again, we'll likely see Hivestats return to prior levels of page views.
LeoFinance has gained even more dominance in the past few months as our daily active users has grown exponentially. This is to be expected because https://leofinance.io serves a wider audience than just Hive. LeoDex and Hivestats only serve Hive users and LeoFinance.io gains a great deal of traffic and daily page views from outside of Hive entirely. This is a healthy trend, in my opinion.
Tokenized Attention is the Long-Game
As I mentioned at the beginning of this report, tokenized attention is our long-term plan to create intrinsic value for the LEO token economy. As our user base grows, we'll continue to see an exponential increase in the amount of monthly ad revenue we generate.
I recently did a podcast interview with @scaredycatguide on a (non-Hive) real estate podcast - Gualter and Mike's show. Their audience is primarily into real estate and other traditional forms of investing. They had me on to talk about LeoFinance and how their community could benefit from setting themselves up on LeoFinance.io full-time in order to create, earn and educate each other with their content.
One of their questions was about the intrinsic value of the LEO token. If users, investors and creators spend their time adding value to the platform, how does that value translate to the token itself?
This is a great question and one that our ad reports answer to a large degree. Mitch had a great point during the show: our ad program is in its infant stages and it has already seen some incredible growth thusfar. Imagine where our ad revenue is as https://leofinance.io gains a far greater level of traction and chases the daily impressions of a site like Seeking Alpha.
With millions of daily impressions, our ad revenue could be through the roof. This has always been our mission with tokenized attention: build an amazing platform and community. Drive new users, readers and engagement to the site and feed that exponential growth machine through ad revenue which is used to buy & burn LEO tokens off the market.
As Mitch and I explained tokenized attention on this podcast, their eyes lit up and this was something that they clearly understood. The model of bringing in money every single month and building a project on sound business principles (a revenue-first approach) makes sense to them. This is tokenized attention and this is the future of how LeoFinance drives exponential growth within our token-based economy.
Speaking of Burns
Over the past month, 6132.930 LEO was purchased from the market using ad revenue.
The current value of this is $1,484 USD although the LEO was purchased generally at a much lower price than today.
This month's LEO buys were burned this morning:
The account still has 2000+ HIVE leftover from the past month.
We brought in $704.55 USD in ad revenue in November (which is paid out in BTC). Today, we'll use this $704.55 USD to buy HIVE (roughly 5900 HIVE at today's price) on an exchange and send it to the @leoads account where it will be used to purchase LEO from the market throughout the month of December.
PSA: Click 1 Button and Support LeoFinance's Ad Program
Most of us in the crypto space use the Brave browser - myself included. I love the Brave browser but one thing that it does to LeoFinance is block our ads.
There is good and bad to this. The good is that every user has the choice to support https://leofinance.io if they don't mind viewing a few non-invasive ads on the sidebar of our pages.
The bad is that the default setting is "Shields On" which means that the majority of our traffic is unmonetized.
If you want to support the LEO token economy, please take the next 10 seconds to click "Shields Off" for https://LeoFinance.io (and LeoDex/Hivestats if you utilize those apps as well). 🦁
LeoFinance is a blockchain-based social media community for Crypto & Finance content creators. Our tokenized app allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.
| Track Hive Data | New Interface! | About Us |
|---|---|---|
| Hivestats | LeoFinance Beta | Learn More |
 |  |  |
| Trade Hive Tokens | Wrapped LEO | Hive Witness |
|---|---|---|
| LeoDex | wLEO On Uniswap | Vote |
 |  |  |
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
This just gets more impressive every month that i read it. And i always read it. It gives me hope for the future of communities and tribes on hive when i see it being done right and hope that we can expand and emulate that with even more groups.
There is no reason that the site can't get into the millions of impressions very soon as we see some exponential growth. The site is set up perfectly for new users to join and with that will come more publicity and more users.
I even had my boss at work start asking a lot more questions about crypto lately after downloading the crypto.com wallet for his phone when he saw mine. He is now waiting on a card and wants to know even more.
I could confidently direct him to the site here knowing it was user friendly and he would get lost for hours in the content as he starts going down the crypto rabbit hole that we all fell into years ago.
Next step will be to get him signed up and on #hive as he starts earning some rewards. This wasn't possible last year as the learning curve was so steep that he would probably have stopped very early in the journey but now he can jump straight in.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Our goal is to make it as frictionless as possible to get started and earn a little bit of crypto quickly. This is what hooks people in so that they can continually sink their teeth deeper and learn about Web3 and why using a platform like leofinance.io (which is connected to multiple blockchains like Hive and Ethereum - and soon, other chains as well) is so valuable from both a monetary and data/immutability standpoint.
Let me know if/when he gets signed up so we can all show him some love as soon as jumps in! 🦁
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I spoke with a guy I use to work with, techie in nature. For years I mentioned crypto, only to fall on deaf ears.
Much of our conversation centered around Bitcoin and his research as he is going down the rabbit hole.
The bottom line is that it is getting a lot more attention than before.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I had another guy at work that had dabbled but never followed me to hive. This guy now is looking for new ways to earn money, new investments and is ready to dive deeper in. Now we have a site that i can send him to and that has lots of interesting content that he can get started with. It's a huge step in the right direction.
Nice one!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Unfortunately I'm blind when it comes to ads, bad habit I know, but am glad to see these numbers. Looks like a steady growth that is going to continue for sure. Congrats guys!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hahaha, also I'm blind for ad's... But, I do know many are not. I started to promote Leo more on Twitter, through comments to all sort of tweets from crypto traders (with and without influence) and even from crypto news services like coingecko and others.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Wow, that's great news! You're great! :)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
😊
Let’s make it happen
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Awesome. Now we just need HIVE to also start following a revenue-first approach... :)
Hive is a general platform token. There is not the one community or website behind it like on Leo. If you want to help hive, set your posts fully or partially to burn
Doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't generate revenue... Current model is unsustainable.
What does it mean to set your post fully or partially to burn?
Means you might as well tell your kids to become anorexic. No rewards for you.
That's insane to suggest burn.
The system is broken and @ash suggests users should be the ones to bare the burden.
Users are the bloodline. Their presence here is beneficial to the system. Not the system (existing broken) beneficial to the user. Hive is after all only a reality because people agreed to follow the code crew. The people are owed some gratitude.
wait, you mean put no reward when you post?
No it means your post gets rewarded but at the end it just disappears like as if you burned it with real fire.
oh what's the fun in that?
I wish there was an extra ad spot for marketplace orders. Eg I want an ad in a specific post or user and order it with a revenue split fro leo and the blogger
All the numbers point to the same thing; growth. It is amazing to look back at where we were in April.
8 months is really not a long time in the scope of things.
Where will we be 8 months from now?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hopefully a lot higher. A major altcoin season sprinkled in would do the trick!
I'm guessing the month isn't ended yet and this month might still be better than last month. But then wow last month was amazing for both engagement and ad revenue, I think with more people we can even do more on a daily basis,
704$ is huge, imagine than on a daily 100,000 unique visits and engagement. It's great to see that purchasing hive then purchasing Leo with it is really good. All the same I'm happy for the Alexa standing. We're going good.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The numbers were for November. But yes we will see if December tops what we saw last month.
It all keeps building. In the meantime, your comments are helping greatly.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I just feel we'll end December in grand style and it's just the 10th day already with 21 days still yet to go.
I'm glad I could add an input, it's evident there's growth on all front and it will continue. I'm looking at in 6 months time and the changes that will occur. It'll be massive
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Alright, I'm convinced.
Shields down, set engines to Full Impulse!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Lol every bit counts keep up the momentum with the BTC climb happening more peope are going to come sniffing around
Nice stats, growth in ads revenue again. Small but steady ;-).
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Is buying and burning tokens the most effective thing to do with the ad revenue?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Though I'm not a specialist in this area, when using the ad revenue stream to buy tokens and burn them, the total amount of tokens in the market is reduce, increasing the value per token because of that. Also, when not using the ad-revenue for token buying and burning, how else should it be used so that the Leo token benefits from it? In the end, the ad-revenue goes to an entity, not to the community. That entity is transferring the value to the community by buying Leo tokens and burning them. I would think this is one of the best ways to bring value to the token in a way that anybody can understand. In the future it would be create of this process of receiving ad revenue buying LEO and burning LEO could be implemented as a Smart Contract, increasing the trust in the system itself.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Damn didn't remember about AdBlock, I just disabled it :P
I cry with emotion after I read these reports, is so nice to see things growing up.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The other communities really need to learn from everything that is being done for you (I mean, Leo team).
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
That's good news.. hopefully we keep flying up the Alexa rankings.. thats more ads.. that's more LEO burned. Hopefully one day the ad revenue is more than the amount tokens issued kinda how Grayscale is buying up all the BTC
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
SEO optimization is the answer. How about doing bounty jobs for hive leo users to submit their original articles to other publication or personal blog with a certain targeted keyword. This technique may help to promote leo more popular to other platforms and forums. Besides that the seo rangking will increase. Giving some reward for authors who submit their posts to other platform with proof.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Revenue generation is the way forward for new projects as more money comes with in the space and development can be paced. Hive also need to do that, for example peakd should.
nice reports sir. have a good day.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Turned off the ad blocker few months ago. Occasionally I've clicked a few ads. None of them lead to anything that interesting. BTW what about @leofinance ads for Brave. The ads I've been getting on Brave has been real high quality.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
That are some great stats. Very cool the see the ad revenues are increasing even though the HIVE chain had a hard time to recover from the last hard fork. Number of posts went down a lot and not increased to pre-HF levels still. But LEO seems to do sooo much better. Though CPM is down, we can see from the charts that a new bottom level is formed. Hopefully this will be sustained, and even better when this will grow in the (near) future.
How to increase CPM: I suppose SEO experts are needed to get LEO posts better positioned in the commonly used search engines.
Community growth: I have no clue regarding the Ethereum eco system, but running ad-campaigns to that community could be worthwhile. I believe MINDS is a social network build on Ethereum. When not done so, why not establish a Leo account over there and get MINDS users to come to LEO as well?
I stopped creating Twitter posts since I hardly have any followers,. But I started to react to Twitter posts from others talking about crypto and promoting Leo, well wLEO since that version of the token is visible by the none-HIVE world. I got some reaction thus far, giving me the motivation to continue :) I would suggest for all of us who like to help out, to respond to all the Twitter crypto influencers and crypto news services with your top x best tokens of 2020 and 2021.... Its the time of year and many asking about what top x tokens of others... Easy Peacy, since its just answering their question :)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The growth in Alexa ranking shows a trend that will be more and more accentuated. Growing up, that sounds like really good news to me. From here will come the other benefits!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I'm glad to see you're still burning tokens with the ad revenues, this isn't so popular with other people but I think it is great.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Excellent write up! Just realized I had my ad blocker enabled on LEO thanks to this article too. Now it's off! I don't mind helping support projects I like.
It will be fun watching as LEO and HIVE continue to grow and mature.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Sounds like a great deal of money is being made
Great LEO Finance results and I like that the strategy is cristalyzing as we look forward. In my opinion we need more financial content beside cryptocurrencies as those bring in more users that are foreign to the space. I still see quite few stocks posts, real estate is still limited for an entry level like me and other domains are not touched at all. We need to capitalize on all these financial niches and maybe come up with some fixed tags to individualize those better as opposed to any tags that we can currently use.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
however, advertising revenue remains very high and it is clear that in the future, with the onbiarding of new users, this data will also tend to increase.
The climb in the Alexa ranking in recent months has been impressive, a sign of how much attention there is for Leofinance. Let's get ready for a sparkling 2021!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
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