TL;DR - Experimenting with platforms that pay during our first 6 months of game development. d.tube, steem really suck. odysee/lbry is not great either. Minds is okay but not profitable. Hive is great though there is A LOT to learn. Over the 6 months we have earned about $0.05 on everything but Minds and Hive. About $3 on Minds. And around $30 on Hive.
Edit July 29th 2021: Of course the dollar values represented are what the various tokens were worth as this was written. With the recent increase in crypto, including HIVE, our profits also technically increased. Since we're keeping it all in the platform, it will rise and fall with the market. Hopefully mostly rise! :D
This is our first time posting with Leo Finance but thought it might be appropriate given the nature of the post. For those that do not know us, we are a small development studio trying to build a video game. Up until now we have primarily posted on Peakd and have posted a few videos on 3Speak.
We started this adventure back in January. In addition to building the game and starting the studio, we decided to do a sort of social media / dev log experiment by only posting on platforms that essentially pay users for posting and engaging in the community. We really had no expectations of earnings but thought it might be cool to get a little funding while also potentially building up a following.
We are approaching a point in our game development that we are starting to think about potential funding sources in general. Spoiler, posting blogs is not quite enough. :D Though, we have surprisingly earned a little over the last six months. So this post will go over how things have gone for us as well as our thoughts and anecdotal experiences on the platforms we have tried out.
Each platform we tried had a learning curve as well as strengths, weaknesses, etc... So as we show the data we'll also share a bit of our experience with each. Going to kind of order them from our least favorite to our most favorite. Save the best for last kind of thing.
So lets start with the worst. Steem, d.tube are our least favorite. When we compared video platforms, d.tube was so much more confusing than the others and we could not even use a user name without a bunch of numbers in it, it was just not a good experience. So we ruled it out before even getting a single video/post up.
We had high hopes for Steem. Before really understanding all the Hive and Steem drama, we thought it would be a good fit. It seemed well established. It also had just added Tron as a reward that matched the SP you earned on posts. We have a Nexo account. Nexo can accept Tron and earn interest. So seemed like it'd be awesome to slowly build some Tron and transfer to a savings account essentially.
Then we started posting and did not have a good time of it. Not going to dive into the drama here, but really, the platform is just super dead! Here is a chart to show the numbers before we just quit and cashed out of Steem.
We were receiving more downvotes than upvotes. Then when the downvoters finally left us alone, there was just nothing. The 2 upvotes that happened for each post were actually from us, our personal accounts. The comments were spam. Across our 5 months of posting there we received 4 upvotes and 1 comment from actual users. Only one post managed to get $0.05 reward. And that is because a random witness vote occurred. We actually did try to engage as well. We joined some communities and tried to interact around the platform and in some discord channels, funded our account a bit. But in the end... on top of how dead it was and annoying the random downvotes were, we also learned more about the feud. It just was not worth the effort, so we cashed out of Steem completely.
Another platform we tried and dropped was LBRY or Odysee as it has mostly rebranded. This one had (and still has) some potential. We only had a couple problems here. One was that it only allows one rewards account per IP address. Obviously this is to fight people trying to exploit the reward system but it is a little discouraging when we're trying to have a channel for our company, run from our home, but also have personal accounts. But the real problem came with the video quality. We had to really compress things down and lower the quality just to get it up there and then it still often would buffer playback even our ten second videos... not a good look, especially when 3Speak handled it all just fine (which we'll talk about later.) So we really just decided not to bother with more than one video platform and Odysee lost. The three videos we did put up also never really earned anything, we didn't gain any kind of following either.
Now that we got the losers out of the way, lets start getting a bit positive. Minds is the first social site like this any of us ever knew. One of us had a personal account on there for a couple years so we had a few spare tokens to help get started. Lets go ahead and start with the charts.
Our experience with Minds has been pretty good overall. The up front tokens helped a lot and most of the early trends were up. We were able to boost posts and get thousands of views. We have managed to amass 44 subscribers and 23.42k profile views. We even received a direct tip from another user of 3 tokens. Most of the other tips on the chart were from us or referral bonuses. All in all we have actually lost money on Minds though. Boosting posts uses our tokens and the engagement rewards are never as much as we spent to promote. We have not actually spent our own money on this, it has all be bonuses and such. However if we had just hoarded our tokens we'd probably have more, but less subscribers. And our engagement levels seem to be going down. Even though our content is getting better. So that is somewhat discouraging. Our account currently sits at 2.7 Minds, which is around 3 USD right now.
We will most likely continue to post on Minds. Even if we start just linking to our Hive posts. But sadly, Minds just does not seem very profitable for us small fries and you seem to have to pay to really get engagements. If we wanted to pay for it, we wouldn't be doing this experiment and instead would just be on traditional platforms.
Hopefully you've made it this far! Our favorite platform of course is Hive.
Though this is not going to be all praise, Hive has been the best experience, even if it does have a very steep learning curve compared to the others.
Lets start with the numbers again.
When looking at this you'll notice the lopsided results. It is true most of our engagement has come in the last few weeks. And even worse, that is all deceiving. Curated posts are great for numbers, but not so sure they translate into long term success. However, it is very encouraging. Our biggest update ever received 124 upvotes and there were some pretty massive votes so we came away with almost 50 on the payout. This was extremely encouraging. Though a bit deceptive. Even though we received 124 upvotes, according to 3Speak our video only was watched 18 times. We did gain 3 followers during this period. But clearly the numbers are a bit inflated thanks to the curation upvotes.
There is some question as to what triggered the success though. We tried a lot of new things on this post. One being that we put on the threespeak tag, which got their attention. But we also used the promote feature on peakd for 3 days at number 1. It was worth it however since it cost 18 Hive and we received that and more back.
Our next post actually was curated as well. It was not as lucrative on the payout but did get quite a few upvotes which is great.
There is so much we don't understand about Hive though. We'd like to experiment more here. We have received .4 PIZZA for example and 10.42 BATTLE. Not totally sure what these do or how to engage in these Hive Engine tokens. That is part of why we elected to post this on Leo. We want to learn more about these kinds of things.
As of right now our account on Hive is valued at $54.07. Of that, we self funded about 90 HIVE worth. We are up to 121.680 Hive Power and want to continue growing that but have also put about 10 HBD in the savings to try that out. We also have about 20 HIVE ready for our next promotion through peakd.
We only have 11 followers. It is also kind of plain to see we are only really getting a consistent engagement of the same 10-20 people. The high numbers on our latest posts are curation numbers. Not complaining, just pointing it out.
Some praise for 3Speak here as well. It never buffers and the quality at which we can upload is just as good as any other option out there. So we definitely plan to continue to use it. Hopefully we can start increasing the quality of our content in the videos though. :D There are more ecosystem apps we've tinkered with as well but this post is getting a bit long and that feels like a tangent so, digressing.
And more praise for Hive in general. Despite some of the drama that exists. Of all the platforms we tried, Hive is the only one that truly feels like a community.
Not going to @ anyone in this post. But really want to thank everyone that has helped us along the way.
Thanks for reading this far. Please feel free to comment anything that might be helpful, we love to learn. Also follow us and check out our game! :)