For those of you who haven't seen it, earlier this week I added a new proposal to the hive DAO system. It has to do with building community support for adding ad revenue to hive.blog and to fund more marketing activities on behalf of the hive blockchain and everything associated with it.
You can read about it in full at this link:
https://peakd.com/hive/@niallon11/hive-ads-and-hive-marketing-proposal-for-ads-on-hive-blog-or-funding-for-hive-marketing-initiatives-qhugcm
It has 50 comments so far and lots of feedback on the idea. I have to say that the majority of the feedback has been in full support of the proposal so far. A small percentage with ideas or not willing to support it but not one person with a negative reply to the idea. They might not agree with the proposal but it has all been in a constructive and thought out manner. One that gives me more ideas on how to refine and improve the vision going forward.
That is not the first task however.
The first step is to show people why we need to change our process and why we need to support marketing efforts on behalf of the community. To change the mindset of those people who have said that marketing is a good idea but ad revenue would ruin the experience or cause us to lose users from the site.
I love feedback
I know that some people can go crazy if others don't agree with their ideas or perspectives but that is a very narrow minded view to have of the world and won't get you very far in business of you are unwilling to listen and adapt.
Personally i love all of the feedback so far and having different opinions will just make a project stronger in the long run. If somebody doesn't agree with my vision for the proposal then it is up to me to change their mind or change the proposal to be more effective. Now in life there will always be a few that like to hold up progress for the sake of it and those you will just need to ignore as long as you have the community support behind you.
If i felt that the community was not behind the idea for whatever reason then i would accept that my ideas were not right and have to go back to the drawing board.
Luckily that has not been the case so far which means that i will just have to convince the people not behind the idea, "YET".
I received a message on discord from one of our witnesses who was not in support of the proposal. Not in a negative sense or in an attack of any sort but who just does not like the idea of placing ads on hive.blog and thinks it will negatively impact our user base.
The feedback,
- I don't disagree with you on our needs.
- I also don't disagree with the proposal in principle although I disagree with ad revenue. From my experience nothing kills a site faster than ads.
- There are better ways to do that. That's based on my experience with placing ads on my sites back in the day and the damage it did to user retention.
- sponsorships would be better than ads imo
These are all fair points and the feedback has been received and thought about.
I do not however agree with their points and will try to show you why.
How I see the situation.
My reply to the message.
All constructive feedback is welcomed. That is the only way to improve upon it. At least you have taken the time to read through it and think about the underlying principle that we need to generate revenue to put back into the token.
I might also be aiming in the wrong direction with this proposal but from the feedback so far don’t think that it is the case. There has been a lot of positive comments on the ideas behind it.
What i would like to see is that if the community were in support of the proposal and could get it funded that witnesses like yourself would be willing to get behind the idea and push for it's implementation even if you weren't the biggest fan of the idea.
I don't mind having the discussions out in the open as i think transparency is good for building and getting people involved. People won't always agree with you but we can always talk about solutions.
So to read into your reply, i would have to ask:
Sponsorships sound interesting. Is there somebody trying to source them and in what form would they come in? What kind of income would this generate and where would it be invested.
I would totally agree that an invasive amount of ads or popups would totally ruin any social media experience but done discreetly and in the best interests of the community would be welcomed and help to grow the platform. IMO
If you have other solutions or know of anybody working on something on along those lines, please let me know. I would love to talk with them and keep pushing forward.
Which sites were you running back in the day. I would love to hear about your experience from it and how it can be done better for hive.blog. We can always learn from these issues and improve the process.
As for user retention I feel that we are already losing those people at a steady rate.
All charts sourced from @penguinpablo reports.
With the price being in a negative cycle since the creation of hive and the lack or marketing/advertising/business planning that we currently have there is less incentive for people to post every day and that will only continue unless we change how we operate from a business perspective. That will mean generating revenue and incentivising people to post on a regular basis.
None of which will happen without the funds needed from ad revenue on the site.
Now I don’t care about the steem side of this as they are full of bots and spam but you can see the decline from hive posting at the same time. It’s a slow but steady negative cycle with loss of users.
It can always be turned around but that won’t happen by doing the same things and expecting different results.
This is also nothing new as it has been going on since back in the day and shows how much activity will follow price action.
So we do need to focus on the price at some stage and build the value of the token at the same time. This will all be part of growing the community and adding new developments. I don’t think that you can focus exclusively on one side of it without adding to the other. You need the full package to be successful.
If you agree with how I see the situation, please vote the proposal and show our witnessess that we want to see these changes being made to strenghten our position in the market and to grow as a community going forward.
You can support the proposal at:
The reply from our witness after my last message.
let me get my thoughts together and potentially it can be made better.
At the end of the day our witness spent a lot of time discussing the ideas in my proposal and trying to find solutions, which i really appreciate. Great to see someone willing to have a chat and try to improve the system. I have to say that they were very willing to talk about solutions and while they still don't agree with ad revenue as it would need a lot of quality control form their perspective, they were very open to any marketing ideas that could be brought to the table and would increase the token price or user base.
If anybody else has thoughts on the matter make sure and leave them in the comments so that we can look at the problem form all angles. Thanks for your time.
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The situation is not good with regard to HIVE, its value has practically always dropped since it was created. I have no solutions or feedback at the moment. It's a good platform and I don't understand why HIVE's value continues to drop.