So this morning (although is almost 3am right now), but I guess, yesterday morning. I was at the Hive Thrive Discord podcast, hosted by and other prominent community members. I usually show up to this show and one constant is the issue relating with the marketing of Hive.
This week I was looking with sorrow at how many projects from https://hiveprojects.io have been abandoned or dead. I even wrote to of the projects to do an update on all these projects. But not all was negative, I found this project called
, which is a wiki application built using the hive blockchain.
However one thing is that communication between different projects is very poor. Most of the marketing efforts and web2 accounts have what I called "mediocre branding project". They promote the Hive logo and associate with causes like 'woman day', or 'earth day' which is not bad, but why does it matter with a blockchain?
When we keep our mouth full of on-boarding, how much of the time you spend promoting Peakd or Ecency platforms vs the other tents of dApps about hive. From to
to other projects that are all dead. Clearly none, and here is the question, is it a personal project or is a community project? Of course the code needs to be written by people with the skills, but is it their business to also be the marketing head to promote it. Do our community even know what their doing?
Unfortunately the data that we have gathered says more that we have no idea what is marketing? Did you know that the marketing team have almost 1 million USD a year to promote Hive? But year after year, money keeps being put into projects that haven't grown at all.
shared with me some data about how much money we are spending around the project and shows the white elephant projects that swallow most of the money from the Hive DAO Fund and how much from the marketing fund.
As you can see, the cyan spikes come from the marketing budget, while the live red has increasingly raise with a big margin directed to print money all while the value of hive dump to new all time lows.
So we need to look in the mirror and start taking some action into cutting back our marketing expenditure and cut funds to funds that simply aren't providing any value.
Let's be honest, VSC for all their promises isn't really doing anything new or special that we haven't seen before with hive engine, or v4v app. Is it more decentralized, yes it is, but we don't really need to get more users. There are many secure KYC-less dapps to send money outside of hive and into hive without needing to leave our credit card, or social security number or even an email.
Star projects from the marketing fund like the racing car sponsoring or the hive fitness project haven't really put any new users to the chain. But also non funded projects like the dapps we have talk about before have produced any new users. So what's the problem here?
I can tell you that not many people know how to do marketing on the web. On my web experience I have never seen a video being shown from a hive project. I have seen projects from other chains and many exchanges and TradFi clips while watching my favorite youtube channel. But never have I seen a hive clip on youtube, instagram or facebook.
I'll say that this is what I feel, and that we really need professionals that understand the internet culture and can connect with the masses to engage and have you trying Hive today. That can use AI fully to create what is needed to optimize the traffic and push the narratives that hive have form for years.
So two things that have to happen sooner than later is cut the funds, review the whole operation and make a plan where each HBD generated is validated with a CPM or EPM (Engagement per milliard) and most not get bellow a certain amount. The plans would need to fail fast and fail often until we get a good program and then put that with a second tier of investment. In a similar fashion on how a startup go from Seed capital, to A-series, to second round investment series, and eventually it should go public and generate it's own funding.