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.
What are you thoughts on this topic @ura-soul?
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:
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.
The challenge of creating video footage tutorials & commercials is probably due to the numerous platforms available to use. To avoid over complexity it would need to be about one of them specifically ie PeakD, Keychain, ecency... etc. And that seems like something those who run the platforms should be organising / funding (perhaps with the help of the DHF).
We could make this a lot cheaper of course if we have talented video creators within the community who would agree to create the video - on that note, I have yet to search for one but, if we are lacking in quality multimedia editors on the platform, perhaps that would be a good field to target. Maybe there is an existing film or video community online who could be onboarded.
I just found a German discord server...
https://disboard.org/server/join/1245113803084009525
There has been a ham fisted approach to this process that seems to be based around the idea that UI operators should market their own projects, yes - but they haven't really done that. It makes far more sense to have a centralised educational system or to at least make tools available that anyone who runs a Hive UI can use to speed up their own educational system. Most of the features on Hive are shared by all UIs, so it would be pretty straightforward to create educational videos about them.
This situation is similar to the way that most Linux OS projects share the same underlying modules and technology but then customise them and add on their own front ends. While it's true that the various front end projects (Ubuntu, Fedora etc.) do produce their own educational and promotional materials, it's also true that there is a vast array of educational material that is available from other sources, which applies to most Linux based OSs.
If the DHF is going to fund numerous, competing front-ends then it has already committed to supporting these projects and it makes no sense to avoid using funds to create educational material about them - perhaps in a separate, dedicated project.
There are many quality video producers in most regions of the world, the problem is not so much finding them, but in linking them up with people who understand Hive deeply enough to create valuable content, who are great communicators and who have the time / resources / funding to do so. Typically, the whales seem to expect community members to do all the work for next to no pay - this is mostly unrealistic.
Video isn't a bad idea. Video has a short lifespan and training materials can become obsolete rather quickly.
We have countless writers here.
I think the cheapest, most efficient approach would be to use these materials to train a chatbot. Then tie that same AI into everything Hive has to offer.
You’re right ads per se seem to have very little effect on gaining new users.
About 18 months ago I utilised a a cricket stats site I own to see if I could build a cricket community on Hive.
The idea was to use the traffic generated on my site via search engine hits which during peak times would be in the tens of thousands per day, to then drive traffic onto my Hive blog.
At that time, the daily blogs I was writing were exclusive to Hive so people coming through the site to find a specific stat had to click through to my Hive blog if they wanted to read a match preview with lots more stats and insight.
It worked in generating traffic to Hive, as you can see from the Peakd Top Daily Views badge but it only got a few people to create an account and actually engage.
From the point of view of building a community the experiment failed because it never hit that critical mass of engaged users necessary to sustain it.
I am by no means a marketing or web design expert. This was all just something to do in my spare time. However if bringing people onto Hive and immediately showing them content they’d be interested in reading didn’t get them to sign-up in droves then how is a static board on a wall with no real incentive for people to stop and think ‘hey that’s something I’d be interested in’ going to achieve better results?
The good news is my failed attempt cost Hive precisely $0.
I 100% agree. Community building from the ground up is very difficult and potentially very expensive. If we have the funds to entice existing communities onto Hive it seems like a much faster, cheaper and ultimately beneficial way of growing the whole ecosystem.
Were any from that community made aware they could support your service by staking tokens and voting, combined with the fact those supporters could then watch their money grow rather than throwing their money away? Plus the community could discuss things in the comment section, and support one another with comment votes? All this simply for enjoying the things they're interested in. Did they know?
Of course majority from that community wouldn't sign on to be content creators (commonsense) but were they made aware of the these other community building benefits? Why would they sign up if they weren't given an incentive to do so?
Get a few communities on that path, focusing only on what they care about and want to support, and there would be a million consumers here in no time.
Absolutely. I had several blogs and 'ads' on my site pushing that messaging.
I think it's still a tough sell. People weren't on the site looking for that, they were their because I created unique, quite niche content that did well on search engines.
I also think the impact was limited by the countries that most of the visitors to my site were domiciled. A very heavy proportion from the sub-continent which is not very crypto friendly so harder to make that messaging stick. Maybe a country like Portugal and a sport like handball are better targets?
Ultimately I think it’s a bit chicken and egg. Do people come for the good reasons and benefits that you’ve outlined or do they come because there’s an established community for them to join and engage with? It probably depends on the individual but the propensity of web2 communities with none of the benefits of Hive suggests that the community element is very important.
Kudos for trying. Super rare.
Yeah, often if it's basic information or generic content freely available, consumer won't see the need to support it with their own money.
Crypto could also be a deterrent, in many ways, which I won't get into here.
People usually support personalities or brands. The human connection matters. That's what people support and makes the content or community unique. A basic topic won't go far, when it comes to attracting outside people and support.
Most likely a community here would need to be established but in many ways some are, aside from the consumers being absent and few interested in reaching outside to bring some in along with support. People are able to create communities here but they're not building them. They just continuously add content to them that has a very short lifespan. Curators pay creators so there's no incentive to reach out for views or support. Once you're already at the making money stage, there's no real reason to build or make adjustments to attract outside interest. So it's kind of like the chicken eating its eggs.
Moving one community from one site to another requires all those added perks. Without that, there's no reason to move. But very few attempt to onboard the paying supporter consumer crowd. Can't say I've seen one try and be successful, since it would be quite obvious if they did.
I wrote the original of this manifesto some years ago. The challenge (for me, anyway) is that it does require a rare amount of time to make happen. I spoke to a couple of workshops of interested people in the summer, and I found that new accounts do need almost 1:1 support to get anywhere.
and I wouldn't mind trying but I do have to earn a living.
agree it's a tough sell!
Hive branding on cards and stuff is something you do when your a major company and you have money to blow. They never bring back the dollars that were put out. That's ALWAYS been the case and I agree that these things shouldn't be funded anymore from the DHF.
As for ads I don't mind it much if it's skipable after 5 seconds or is limited. I can understand that revenue has to be generated for both the platform and person producing the content. So I like the option to watch some ads (nothing too crazy) and then the option to pay to remove them is I want. What I don't like is the clear over spam of ads which actully is what's killed ads for the most part. I remember way back in the day you used to pay $5 -$10 for 1,000 impressions of a 468x60 banner ad lol. It's because it got results. People are becoming blind to such ads because there's just too many now.
What we need to do is use the DHF funds as an almost incubator for new applications that run on top of hive and offer new things to do with it.
Applications bring in users and those applications can have affiliate programs or just general marketing behind them. This benefits it two ways. The first is that most of these are friends or family or they have a way online to reach out to that person if they have question which trust me someone new to hive is going to have a lot of questions.
The second is development maybe hackathons where the application is decentralized and could become a new feature of hive. Offering up things like solid DeFi, games, swaps and yada yada like other chains have.
And the last is money talks. By reducing DHF selling pressure on the Hive token we can help to start getting it to recover. There's so much sell pressure and so little reason to honestly have hive yourself. If the token price goes up people are going to be more interested to get their hands on it because at the end of the day that's all anyone really cares about is making profits. So this is where ad revenue comes into play to help support the price and what's being paid out to people. It's a proven VERY successful way of doing things as you can see with youtube, facebook, x etc. These are multi billion dollar companies if not a trillion dollars with a TON going on.
Excellent post, I have been talking to several people about hive marketing for a while now, this marketing is getting boring and monotonous. More than a year ago I wanted to make a test with a more addictive marketing, incorporating music we started to create music themes where it talks about hive and its opportunities. As you say the ads are boring but the music is not! And it does not go out of style, I have been doing small events where I achieved the adoption of people and investors as I said using music creating addictive rhythms and ways to explain hive that are dynamic and attract attention. It has even caught the attention of some investors but I have not achieved anything because I do not have the support of anyone within the platform to guide me to work with investors. At this stage I am a novice and as I said the events are small because there is no support everything is worked with my own money, I feel that if we can do better in marketing we just have to open our minds to new ideas and stop thinking that marketing is square.
The problem with the banner stuff is that they're not designed for onboarding, they're designed to continue an already established brand and keep them at the front of people's minds.
When I walk past a coca cola ad and my eyes see it for a fraction of a second, and my head is like 'hmm im thirsty, I could really do with a nice, icy coke right now'.
Or, if its say a store brand you don't know of, you'll make a subconscious note of it, and when you see it next to your usual brand when shopping, you take more conscious note of its presence as a 'legit' brand, and try it out instead of your normal choice.
Neither of these situations are the case with Hive. Nobody is going to randomly remind themselves Hive exists and they just forgot about it until now, and nobody is going to see it in their daily lives after the game. It's literally the wrong form of advertisement... (no offence to the person who did that).
I think some professional market research and business training may be necessary, rather than a bunch of random bloggers throwing out ideas, getting shut down, rinse and repeat
Indeed, and the name Hive in and of itself is so generic. I mean these sort of advertisements would do a lot more for a unique name that'd make people wonder what it is like splinterlands or holozing but even then as you say the effect is minimal to none.
I heard of 'Locals' as a form of supporting youtubers, an alternative to Patreon. The only way I heard about it is because youtubers started using it and it benefited them, or they got sponsored - a little pay - to bring it up at the end of each video.
Now I know what Locals is, what it does, why it exists and how to join. It's drilled into me over months.
This is the correct approach!
I agree, there are plenty of people in the platform using YouTube or other video platforms on which they could be promoting the Hive community at the end.
Hey acid, very interesting and valuable post.
My take 100% to the point.
Spending any amount on advertising without getting our shit done (onboarding made easy as 1-2-3, major exchange listings and stable and tested L2 smart contracts) is a complete waste.
Plus, we are financing through inflation, adding non-stop selling pressure(a very relevant now should say).
We should let HIVE price breath for a bit and try to stabilize it a a higher level. Currently we are drowning onto our DHF and valueplan non-stop expenses. We need many thousands of $$ daily JUST to keep us at the current price.
Who are the ads aimed at? Westerners or Easterners?
Americans and Brits can't access Binance. Bittrex and Poloniex have shut their doors. And Tribaldex has stopped processing withdrawals.
So it's getting harder and harder to buy and sell Hive in the west. Nobody is going to onboard a coin you can't trade.
Koreans and other easterners have access to a lot of exchanges listing Hive. But they find this place unwelcoming and prefer Steemit.
Until you have sorted out the exchange problem (getting a listing on Kraken or Coinbase), you are wasting time advertising.
Those are some good points, what I've heard is that most exchanges are gatekeepers demanding big money to get your coins listed unless you generate ridiculous volume to get listed for free, the latter often is faked on most coins.
There is nothing stopping Hive organising a "Hive buying day" to push the volume up on the exchanges, so that the coin has a good story to tell Coinbase/Kraken about volume and community in order to get a free listing. With the price at 16 cents, it's the best time to do it.
Also - high volume on exchanges is a form of advertising to people who use those exchanges (being on the top traded lists etc).
That is true?
Looks like they've re-started again, but from Tuesday to Saturday, no withdrawals were processed. I've no idea why.
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Although every little thing might help I don't think banner displays (whether it is on web 2.0 or in real life) are very effective as long as your 'brand' isn't known.
Personally I have never googled for 'products' which brands were on banners or shirts if I didn't already knew the brand.
Would you google for Spotify because it's on the shirt of FC Barcelona if you didn't know what is is? When a brand already has a reputation shirt sponsoring or banners help to generate more traffic.
I think this is a much better approach. If you manage to attract a descent number of people from a community, it might thrive. If someone could onboard 1000 members to an active handball community on Hive I think it could attract more people.
We have quite a lot of interesting and active communities that have the potential to attract new users to Hive.
I remember seeing your initiative in the OCD discord a few days ago that actually proposed something like this (I could have reacted to that, but I was too busy and forgot about it).
I think the idea is good, but I also think that community leaders don't really have time for that and for some Hive is their community.
I think it would be better when there this promotion is centralized. A dedicated marketing team could promote some active communities on web 2.0 platforms by sharing Hive posts. They could even assist in creating accounts and the first steps on Hive to make it a success.
I honey didn't think handball was still a thing until I saw the Olympics this year. I thought it died thirty years ago with my beloved high school career. The recent numbers from valueplan I think are very telling. I'm not saying people are milking the system but perhaps the answer to why handball is because we allow it. $50,000 for a $10,000 sponsorship (or whatever). I'm almost sad I didn't think of it myself!
It's a bit sad that not only have most people not heard about this on hive but no one had any choice in choosing if this would be a good idea. Using hive polls I think it could bring quite some improvement on newer proposals to check the "wisdom of a crowd" before partnerships are built or funds spent on certain onboarding attempts.
Have you also heard about the motorcycle and the bike we sponsor in Latin America? I don't remember how much is the sponsorship for them... At least the cyclist was doing well in some competitions, I read at some point.
But overall, I agree with some of the other points made in the comments... General marketing is better suited when you are already an established and known company/platform and you want to keep reminding your potential customers you exist, or when you have lots of money to spend on marketing, like Crypto.com has.
I totally agree with you. Polls are tool that I always forget about, but it needs to start getting used more.
Where do I find polls?
Peakd maybe?
You’ve made solid points about the effectiveness of marketing strategies, and focusing on partnerships within the crypto space seems like a more targeted approach for Hive's growth right now!
I believe they are the kind of people who can grasp the concept, the how-to, and the environment better than those from the Web2 space.
Given that ETH and SOL performed well over the past six months compared to Hive, I think they might bring some investments or projects to the Hive platform. Why? Because Hive has a strong, albeit small, community, and its fast, almost-free transactions are one of the best features the blockchain can offer.
I agree to some extent of what you are saying ,but I do think we are missing the opportunity. The hand ball sponsorship is a good example as this basically should give us access to engage with the sports fans inside and outside of the arena. I used to be a promotions manager for a major cigarette brand many years ago and the sponsorships was a way of gaining access to those people attending the events. Hive paying out x amount of dollars is only doing half the job and why it is not having any impact.
There are so many of the sponsorships/charity events we do that mean well and in good faith, but have no major impact or benefit for Hive. I am glad this topic is being raised and will also be writing a post this weekend on this subject.
I don't disagree that if it hadn't just been that but a starting point to bring people in somehow it could've meant more, but the ads in and of themselves would never accomplish much IMO.
Yes that is the problem. I actually looked at a sponsorship deal but it would involve me working every Saturday and I cannot commit to that just yet. That was the time I would have given freely and not expected anything in return to make it benefit HIVE.
I didn't even know we were funding a Handball thing. I was already surprised that the rally car thing has gone as long as it has. We aren't really promoting to people that would be open to Hive and crypto. I think ads can be good, but it needs to be done right. I avoid clicking any crypto ads because of fear of any malicious links. I have seen Blanchy's post/report, and I wonder how much has Hive benefitted from all these.
A lot of concerns have been raised on accounts and ownership, but shouldn't there be more criticism and auditing of the DHF where a lot of the actual money of Hive are going to?
That's a good point as well, I got the feeling most people weren't even aware of the handball thing let alone being able to cast a vote/opinion if it was a good idea to begin with.
Really great ideas!
I've been pondering for a while how to attract an audience or, more precisely, get over the hump of getting accounts opened and active on Hive.
Now, proposing a project with 1,000HBD prize weekly (for either saving/money management or creative writing in my case) would be a great jumpstart!
I ran two workshops in the summer, with about forty participants overall. There was a lot of interest, lots more awareness and experience than when I last tried to talk to a group, but getting from there to participating in Hive has proved a challenge I haven't overcome yet.
Hi @shanibeer, I am currently trying to get some type of creative writing contest going to onboard more users to hive. They are all mostly creative writers, journalists and copywriters. I wonder if by the time comes, if you'd like being the judge and I'd be happy to collaborate with any ideas that you'd have as well.
I am aware though the challenge is definitely retention but I mean, if the space is fun enough for them and fits their interest, they'll come back around.
Let me know if you have any thoughts/ideas/advice. I am currently gathering some resources and advice since I don't want it to flop 😅 and embarrassing for hive in general.
Hi @macchiata, how are you? I thought of you yesterday when I was ordering my new Moleskine diary for next year.
Your idea sounds exciting 😍
What I've been thinking about is how we bring more readers (content consumers) to Hive. I wrote a Manifesto for The Ink Well community a couple of years ago and I have been thinking again recently how to go about it.
My idea now is to attract, say, ten, published writers - authors who already have an audience and whose names are known to the (book-buying) public. I would ask them to come and write for Hive and, importantly, to aim to bring their audiences, the people who already buy their books, with them. I'm basing my ideas on the multi-media approach that the Wachowskis interwove with The Matrix films (fan fiction, graphic novels, games, back stories etc).
The idea would need publicising (I'm looking at the UK). I'm thinking about approaching Oggadoon who worked with xigxag an independent audio-book provider as a literary promoter. If you look at the Oggadoon link, you'll see the campaign they ran for xigxag and the results.
I'm leaving this until 2025 now when I have more time to attend to it. It will need support from the DHF to cover the marketing campaign, and I'm wondering whether it is something that will fit with the @valueplan programme, but I haven't investigated yet.
Is there any overlap with your ideas? 🙂 It's really kind of you to think of me as a judge, but I'm not sure I'm the best person. Maybe the people at The Inkwell could help. I'm tagging @agmoore and @jayna, perhaps you could advise?
Happy to chat about ideas on Discord 😍.
Oh wow! the idea definitely overlaps. We need more readers/consumers and also content writers that actually could trend this site all around with a good SEO.
For me, it's mostly indonesian based writers who write in English and Indonesian. We do have a few published authors here as well and I will be connecting with them soon. I'd be happy to chat as well so we could combine our ideas and expand them more. I know that these days AI reigns but honestly, there's still market for people who enjoys to read/reading from human's work. We just need the space to do that and more support for that hehe 😄
I am currently working on the manifesto and will be happy to chat as today I am going to hear back and discuss with the potential collaborators.
~ see you around and looking forward to be talking with you 😊
😍 - AI has its place, but creative writing and the human connection is something different. From what I've seen, fans love being able to interact with their favourite writers. Getting back stories about favourite characters, supporting writers they like (and it costs them nothing other than their original stake).
I feel that we need some professional marketing help, though, if we want to succeed.
yes!
Hi @shanibeer,
Thanks for tagging me. I'm not good at marketing, but I am good at grunt work. If there is any hands-on writing, etc that needs to be done, I volunteer. @jayna is far more polished and savvy than I am, but I do know her plate is full (whose isn't?). Great initiative. Getting published authors to join is potentially fruitful.
Let me know how I can help. My husband is looking at some serious health issues in the future (let's hope not). If these materialize, I will have to pull back. Otherwise, you can count me in for grunt work.
Hello @agmoore 😍
Sorry to hear about your husband, I hope that works out well.
Although grunt work is a necessary part of life, I was thinking more about @macchiata's request for a judge or judges for the contest. The folks involved with The Ink Well are all much more skilled than me.
@guiltyparties - is the above idea for attracting readers and writers to Hive something that valueplan would be interested in? The Manifesto has the fundamental idea, in the comment above I'm talking about using a specialist agency to get the media exposure.
Many thanks.
@shanibeer and @macchiata -- thank you for the invite -- consider me looped into the conversation as specifics are discussed and developed.
👍
Wow... 50k for a banner... That reminds me of the 300k bike shelter that was recently installed outside government buildings here in Ireland. I can't help but see it as a no-cost contract, where the business selling the service had friends in government.
I'm not entirely sure what the VP is... been out of the picture for a while, but I assume it's some fund like the DHF? If all owners of Hive power are governing the funds, then its kind of funny that this went ahead... Surely it would be better to fund projects that involve powering up Hive right now while the price is so low
I feel like the biggest issue with VP right now is that there's too few people in charge of it which may lead to decisions that either aren't thought out well or just lack vision. Not sure.
Where can I get more information on VP? I don't know what it is
I think, this would be the right marketing approach to hand pick communities that would gain from hive as well as market hive to more people. We have some good community in India and given the size of population with internet on everyone's hand, we can try to do some niche marketing that would be effective, bringing some influencers.
Spend HBD is also a niche project having lot of prospects, may be we should make that a big event, by having a weekly lucky draw that would give say 5k or even more ( to create some hype) and spend some more to show that in social medias.
I like the topic, and I believe Hive needs a lot more advertising with a lot less money spent. I really can't comprehend how a $50,000 banner in a handball stadium, with only a few thousand attendees per year, can onboard people. Even if someone notices the banner, they would likely forget it by the time they get home. The same goes for the Hive rally car.
With $50K, placing ads on Instagram and Facebook could be much more effective. A link could lead users to a page that educates them on the basics of Hive, answers questions, and helps them create an account where they'd receive Hive Power as a reward. For context, a $500 ad on Facebook and Instagram could reach 50K to 150K people in just 5 days.
The HP reward would go to the first one able to create several accounts faster than the other 10 creating several accounts. RC delegation would be the way to go with something like that.
Yes, farming would also be a problem, but why would someone go through all that trouble just for resource credits? In this example, $50,000 was spent on a banner, yet no one knows what Hive is, so no one will even bother to look.
Maybe connecting an Instagram or Facebook account would help, and the rewards don't need to be more than $3-5.
Some have several accounts on IG and FB for farming giveaways and whatever else they can find.
I've been to quite a few hockey games, and I don't go to stare at the ads on the boards. I can't remember one, yet I can recall happenings on the ice, and those happenings are usually what I'd talk about afterwards. I watched several games during the playoffs on TV and I don't remember one ad on the boards, or any of the commercials.
HP and RC both give access to the site and whatever else. I just wonder what they'll do once they get here. Create content? Very few consumers here which is an issue that could have been tackled long ago. Thousands suddenly show up, we can't support them. Just spending money on speeding up the revolving door. And no new money coming in the door.
Any marketing attracting "users" here, no matter the cost, yields the same outcome. People coming, then leaving.
Hmm, I just thought I had a brilliant idea and then I remembered ... how do we get the consumers ...
Hard to say precisely how. Normally appealing content is all it takes.
I think due to the earning only mentality here, thousands of consumers who attempted to be content creators and left due to difficulties earning, could still be here earning as a consumer, but weren't offered that as an option, so we'll never see them again. They wanted the big post money, or nothing. Plus they're encouraged to automate and be absent for "ROI."
Perhaps it has something to do with the culture here. That's looking at the past.
At this point I'm not sure if enough people want to take that role seriously enough to incorporate it. So getting down to the how might not be a worthwhile plan right now. People might still want to try the usual way for a few more years.
Meanwhile other projects here might want to include it in their way of life, treating it like a fresh a start. Two streaming platforms are aware of my suggestions. So maybe they'll pick up the slack, since that style of content doesn't work without consumers anyway.
Others can simply reach out. Isn't that what content creators normally do? Here they're told to mingle with the locals...
Streaming services sounds like a good option.
I've linked the manifesto I wrote for readers and writers (Hive is unique ... you get paid to read) elsewhere. I've talked to xigxag, done a workshop with the department of alternative economies and social value at the local university about the opportunities for creative industries as part of a business festival, run several other events, written to two youtube influencers (both writers), talked to the two local authority library networks (desperate to encourage more readers/borrowers).
Most recently, partly through reading your comments, I thought about getting a set of well-known writers (ie published by mainstream publishers) together, maybe spearheaded by a literary prize-winner, as the nucleus to attract consumers/readers.
So maybe the catch line is earn through reading, rather than earn through creating.
The contest should be simply following the social media (SM) account. That way you get far more entries and an audience who will continuously get Hive in their SM feed.
The thing about advertising, when it comes to the subliminal effects that make it worthwhile, it only works if there is so much of it that the audience is likely to come across it at least 3 times. One banner, seen once and never again is completely ineffective even if placed in the best location. Switching the focus to increasing the number of people following the SM accounts - even if they don't think they're interested in what they're selling - is a strategy that leads to more people seeing it more often. And there's no challenge or cost to following the Account, besides their attention - what we want.
I've been amazed to see Hive Rally car several times now, in WRC Croatia and in local international rally, logins are a bit difficult indeed, it's not difficult, but it's not a straight on login like other web2 pages are used to be
Today less and less people are into adds, not only web2 to web3 is a big change, but people changed in this times. addblockers, paid subscribtions to have no adds etc
I believe it will definitely catch on, when asking people around me about web2, web3 they didnt even catch that part happening, or mentioning just coin or crypto related, there is still a huge 'scary' feeling for them
See all those people in front of the banner ad on the wall, watching the content in front of them?
That's where the real money is.
Any marketing meant to simply attract people here and maybe use the platform, combined with no plan to attract a paying audience, is a waste of money. Spend money to bring them here and spend money to keep them here = fail
Handball?? I thought that was only played in prison.. they never heard of Pickleball? Seriously though.. the sign up is to difficult.. my friend Patrick would be great here but even I can't figure out how to get him a account.. with account creation tickets just sitting around collecting dust..
Think pickleball is mostly popular in the states :p and yeah, our gateways from there aren't great (exchanges), we're lucky to still have a big userbase from there by now to be honest.
LOL, interesting angle to look at this waste of DHF money. It would be better to post an ad at various animal shelters for hive.io
"Post photos of your cat and make some cat-ching!"
"Blog about your dog for some $$$ treats"
Worst case scenario if no one signs up the funds goes to animal shelters and not some for profit, random, politically biased professional game.
To be honest, from what i see, the most effective marketing comes from onboarding people trough their passions / utility of the ecosystem. The more projects hive has, the more snowball marketing effect it will be.
Best advertisement is top notch content creators. And I don't mean we need to big names, but we need creative people to make something go viral on hive platform.
I thought the handball sponsorship was excessive in my opinion. It must be a popular sport in Portugal. Seems a bit random for a large amount of money. Not saying anything dodgy about this but it may be the wrong target market here.
Advertising is an end in itself, especially for a cryptocurrency. But it is still a marketing campaign that will need to be supported. Even a collaboration with some large company in the web sector would be a great opportunity
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 38/48) Liquid rewards.
An ambassador system would be very helpful. A user receiving a HivePower delegation in the amount of 10k, 20k, 50k or any other amount proportional to their size on web2 for promotion would be a great alternative.
It would not issue more tokens to cover the costs.
Who would delegate, though? There's a cost to those delegating.
Maybe a DHF-funded HiveMarketing profile? That way the money issued by DHF would not be withdrawn a priori.
I agree, competitions will provide good retention and a small increase in new participants. It would be good if these were long-term competitions based on HP gains by participants.
Personally, seeing small commercials for a short period of time where some of the qualities of the #Hive family can be shown would be interesting to attract future new users. I really like the idea of marketing, it is an option that we should take advantage of to continue growing and reach the greater number of people
To infinity and beyond 😁
Exploring short video ads for marketing hive is what you are advocating for. Let's explore that method and see what comes out of it.
That would be a great idea. Introducing short video ads in hive blockchain which project the platform really great
I have an idea to promote #Hive perhaps in the near future and it is to actively participate with a Minor Baseball team of some cousins and friends. I have that in mind to reach more people and make known all the good things that #Hive has for us
Yeah I agree on the ads. Our biggest issue until fairly recently, when a few Hive community members put up their credit cards, was simply not being able to make mainstream social ad purchases. We've had a lot of discussion about crypto ads in crypto spaces but those costs were higher by far than anything else because they cater to the bottomless wallet types of projects.
Our other challenge is we don't have a charismatic founder to build relationships with reporters and personify the chain. We don't do backroom deals. It's improving just through exposure, mostly at events, but its still a problem. It's hand in hand with the onboarding and tracking, which you talked about and I won't repeat.
The other thing was reliance on influencers. They were originally flat-out banned because there were several indications, and I'm not going to say who, of Hive members with followings on socials asking for funds to promote Hive. Right now we've got Vibes going and a few other things, they're working out well. You know how well your initiatives did, they're somewhere between niche marketing and influencer marketing.
The strategy in general is changing as the world around us changes, as it's supposed to do. Right now we have to figure out the strategy for 2025.