I have been a bounty hunter since December 2017, and from that day until now, I have learned a lot of things in order to spot good bounty campaigns.
At first, what I was doing was just randomly joining campaigns that appear on the first page of the Bounties page, and it really didn't turn out well, as most of the campaigns that I joined that time turned out to be unsuccessful or scams so now, I created a method wherein I rate the campaigns that will most likely be successful based on my own view.
Here are the steps that I conduct to choose the best campaigns apart from the rest. This is done in chronological order. I do this everyday so that I can cover all bounty campaigns created.
- List all bounty campaigns
- Check Scam accusation and Reputation Boards
- Check the bounty manager
- Check official twitter, facebook, Telegram and Linkedin page of ICO
- Check bounty allocation for campaigns
- Check Whitepaper
- Check Number of Participants And Tier Rewards
- Check KYC Submission on ICOBench or other rating / review sites
I will explain each step in great detail, like how I actually do it everyday when searching for bounty campaigns to join into.
- List all Bounty campaigns
First thing you need to do is put everything on a spreadsheet.
One column should be for the bitcointalk bounty campaign link, and the second column is the name of the ICO. Use this link to go to the bounties section and sort the topics based on date created so it's easy to take note of the campaigns that you have listed or reviewed before.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=238.0;sort=first_post;desc
Once you're at the page, open each topic which you haven't reviewed or visited yet. Open only those threads or topics that contain [bounty]. If a topic is just an airdrop, I don't open them anymore since I don't join airdrops due to its very low reward. Copy the bitcointalk bounty campaign link and the name. It should look like this on your spreadsheet.
Bitcointalk Bounty campaign link | Name of Campaign
This will take a lot of time if this will be you're first time to do this since you have to go through a lot of campaigns, but once you're used to doing this everyday, it won't take much of your time. You can try to list 200 campaigns for now, or any number you're comfortable with, but let me say that those 200 campaigns will most likely be reduced to 20 once you have conducted all the steps mentioned above.
- Check Scam accusation and Reputation Boards
Huge thanks to some of our scam police members here in Bitcointalk like ICOEthics and Coolcryptovator who continue to spot Scam ICOs with Fake team and plagiarized content. This is a very vital step that you need to do everyday. Always check these two boards to see if the campaigns you listed are actually scam ICOs. Since you have listed them on your spreadsheet, just use the find function and if a listed ICO on your spreadsheet matched an ICO stated to be a scam on the boards, delete it from your spreadsheet. This is the first step to reduce the number of your listed bounty campaigns.
Link to Scam Accusation Board: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0
Link to Reputation Board: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=129.0
Always read the thread before deleting because sometimes, it's just a scam accusation or a question being asked to the admin of the ICO.
By this time if you have 200 listed campaigns, it should have been reduced to around 170.
- Check the bounty manager
I have joined a lot of bounty campaigns since I started and there are campaigns that I don't join into because of the bounty manager. We have our own preferrence on who we consider the best bounty manager is but, just to reduce our listed campaigns, we need to remove the following campaigns from our list.
Topics / threads that are started by:
a. Newbies (Except copper member)
b. Bounty managers that have bad reputation
You can read about reputation of bounty managers on the Scam Accusation and Reputation Boards. We have our own opinion on each bounty manager, so best thing to do is read about them and somehow try out their campaign and see if you like how things are run under his management.
Remove the listed ICOs on your spreadsheet that are started by newbies and bad reputation bounty managers.
By this time, you 170 campaigns should be reduced to around 130.
- Check official twitter, facebook, Telegram and Linkedin page of ICO
This is where you'll spend a bit of time browsing through their social media pages one by one. What I do is look for "Relevant Posts" only. Go to their Facebook and Twitter and look for 3 most recent relevant posts. If the social media pages do not have at least 1 relevant post within 7 days, remove them from your listed campaigns.
My Criteria for relevant posts
a. Articles / News relevant to the ICO / platform
b. Posts on Conferences / Roadshows / AMAs
c. Video interviews / Pictures of meetups with the ICO team
Posts that I don't consider relevant
a. Posts about their other official social media pages
b. Posts about airdrops / Bitcointalk ANN / Bounty
c. Posts about token price / date of token sale
d. Posts introducing their team members
e. Posts about Token allocation / Roadmap which can be found on the website
I don't consider them relevant because you can already see them in the website plus it does not provide new information about the ICO. The relevant posts that I am looking for are things that are really related to the ICO or platform. If the platform is all about E-sports, then the social media pages must have posts or articles that talk about E-sports.
Once you're done with Twitter and Facebook, go to their LinkedIn Page and see if it exists.
Once you're done with the three social media pages, go to the telegram group and see if there are people inquiring about the platform or ICO. If the telegram group does not have people asking questions, it means it's a dead group.
Remove all the campaigns that do not pass mentioned criteria.
By this time, your 130 campaigns should be around 60 campaigns.
- Check bounty allocation for campaigns
I choose campaigns that have realistic yet not to low allocation for its bounties:
10% individually for Twitter or Facebook
3% for Telegram
10% for Content
If it's less than what's mentioned above, I don't join them.
By this time, your 60 campaigns should be around 50 campaigns.
- Check Whitepaper
As a content writer, I really need to check the whitepaper in order to get the most accurate information to write about, but for those who are not joining content campaigns, just look at the tokensale part of the whitepaper. You need to know the ICO price of the token. The reason for this is sometimes bounty managers do not provide this information on their thread. You will be surprised to know that in the end, the total allocated fund for the bounty is just $6000 because you did not know that 6,000,000 tokens allocated for bounty is equivalent to only $6000 (1 token = $0.006).
You also need to check the whitepaper if it's identical with other whitepapers that you have read in the past. If there's something identical, then it means that it was plagiarized.
For additional information, it's best to read the whitepaper to fully understand the ICO / platform so that if someone asks a question on telegram or other social media channels, you can help in providing accurate answers about it.
By this time, your 50 campaigns should be around 40 campaigns.
- Check Number of Participants And Tier Rewards
For Facebook and Twitter, you need to check if the rewards are based on the number of followers. It will beneficial for you to choose campaigns with tier rewards if you have huge number of followers for both Twitter and Facebook.
Another thing you need to check if rewards are given based on stakes or you will only receive a certain amount of tokens every week.
After checking this, look at the spreadsheet and see how many participants they have. If they have more than 1000 participants by the time you checked, remove the campaign from your list. This is because the reward in the end will be so low since it's divided to over 1000 people, regardless whether you have high number of followers.
Just remember that if rewards are based on stakes, the lower number of participants, the higher the reward.
I retain campaigns that have fewer than 500 participants listed on their spreadsheet.
By this time, your 40 campaigns should be around 24.
- Check KYC Submission on ICOBench or other rating / review sites
This last step is completely optional, but I actually use ICOBench only for this purpose. It justs boosts the reputation of the admin team of the ICO if they submitted KYC, but not a lot of ICOs actually pass KYC on ICOBench or other review sites.
I don't believe much on reviews done by advisors or experts because there is a possibility that those are paid adverts.
The final 24 that has remained in your listed bounty campaigns are the ones that you will be joining at. Always check the Scam Accusation and Reputation boards because maybe one of the final 24 that you joined at might have a scam accusation which was just discovered now.
Also, when joining campaigns, it's best to join early like in week 1 up to week 3, so that you can maximize the rewards.
Based from my experience, joining 24 good campaigns is better than joining 60 random campaigns because these 24 good campaigns have a better chance to be successful than those 60 random campaigns, so it's worth using up your time to choose only the best campaigns focusing on quality over quantity. This is what I learned when I started this method.
How about you guys? What are the things you do before joining bounty campaigns?