The Kusamarian - 6 Month Funding Discussion (Now on chain!)
Hellloooo Polkadot!
We'd like to open a discussion re: 6-months maintenance of The Kusamarian, a Polkadot-centric media brand. We are a platform upon which the stories of Builders and tokenholders are spoken and shared.
A discussion document can be found right here!
A replay of the LIVE complete read-through of that document as well as the discussions on the comments of this post is here.
The official Spend Proposal Document is here.
A changelog of the discussion document is here.
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to review and discuss!
tl;dr?
- Proposal covers the creation of 6 shows addressing different audiences within and outside the Polkadot Network. (Jump to Relevant Media 6 Days a Week)
- Media created revolves around values of truth, reliability, freedom of access, journalistic independence, positive discourse, openness, and long term success of Polkadot.
- Transparency is pivotal to our operations with all rough creation work here and every treasury movement recorded here. (Jump to "Media Standards")
- Despite serving tokenholders exclusively under a bear market, YouTube viewership remained stable while we experienced excellent growth on Twitter including 3x followers since August 1. (Jump to "Challenges 🤝 Solutions")
- Twitter's new direction with video delivery, money integration, and becoming a source of truth combined with its superior networking features lead us to a new Twitter-first strategy in 2023.
- Experiments with more consumable content threaded into stories of relevant tweets have shown very productive results. (Jump to "Twitter First Strategy").
- After successful experiments promoting content with Twitter Ads and TikTok Promotions we see that a promotion budget of $10,400 will yield at least 3.64 million impressions, 520,000 video views, and 5,700 followers on Twitter and 520,000 video views and 52,000 likes on TikTok in addition to continued organic growth. (Jump to "Promotion Strategy")
- Due to efficiency gains, more consumable episodes, and budget tightening we will able to offer the same service over the next 6 months plus an additional weekly Tokenomics content piece, further development of AAG 🥚, and the above promotion program for 80% the cost of the previous 6 months!
- Total budget currently stands at $286,026 for 194+ pieces of content, project maintenance, and development over 26 weeks. Budgets are parsed by show. (Jump to "Budget")
- The Kusamarian team is comprised of doctors, engineers, and professional media veterans committed to serving tokenholders and the long-term success of Polkadot. (Jump to "The Kusamarian Team")
We thank you for your consideration of this proposal! The Kusamarian is committed to serving Token Holders in the best way possible. If you see room for improvement or growth please let us know. Who knows? Maybe you can join the team!
Thank you Polkadot! and thank you Kusama! ❤️
Comments (43)
This proposal zeros in on an interesting philosophical, ethical and strategic question - should public funds at the core of Polkadot be used to pay for services from the incumbent data monopolies that the ecosystem aims to replace?
If yes - this is a dangerous drift in a direction of degrading the core values of the ecosystem and a slippery slope to continuing the addiction of crypto teams to the broken incentive models of incumbent digital media platforms.
If no - then we move more concretely in a direction that demands we think more creatively about the technology, talent and resources at our disposal, creating more organic 'engagement' through creative partnerships with creators and publishers who are more aligned with the fundamental principles of 'Web3'.
I'm unsure if this request is precedent setting, or if there are other funded proposals that are using treasury funds of KSM or DOT for paid promotion. Would be interested to know.
This is an important debate that we need to have - and the outcome will dictate the foundations on which the future strategic direction for the way funds are utilised to deliver the story of the ecoystem.
The Kusamarian is pretty much our ecosystem's sole reliable public-facing news source, continued funding and providing the means to boost their reach seems like a no-brainer to me.