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!