Create Ad revenue and begin marketing efforts on behalf of Hive.

Proposal Type:

Marketing | Advertising | Hive advocacy

About me.

Just a quick overview. I am a three year member of the blockchain with what is hopefully a solid reputation from being involved with multiple different groups over that time. Consistently active and have constantly been involved with initiatives to build and grow our eco-system.

I currently work in a retail setting as a manager with a large multi national retailer. 18 years employment in consumer based jobs and 14 years management experience.

I currently hold a degree in business management and from January have enrolled in a new level 8 degree course entitled, "Blockchain for Business."

I see a huge future in blockchain based solutions and want to see hive at the forefront of powering these solutions. With that in mind, I feel we need to look at more business solutions for the chain and fulfilling it's huge potential.

I also have control of the hive-blockchain twitter account which is being used to promote and highlight what is being created on the chain.

Project Summary

We are reaching a crucial stage in the development of hive as both a blockchain and as a brand. From it's explosive start and wide ranging exposure in the crypto industry we have since faded from view. This to me is a terrible shame as we know how much work is going on from a development side but there is none from a marketing and advertising side.

This will be just as important to the future of our chain as it is a major factor in token price, attracting new users, attracting developers and attracting investors.

For us to bring all of these important factors into line we will need a business plan and external revenue to fund these ventures. While I do feel that the future will lie in the different groups and tribes using hive to build their amazing projects.

In my opinion, unless we move now to position ourselves as a valuable place to build we will not attract the developers or users that will be the backbone of this community and keep building amazing new things.

We have the technology, and through some great work from our core developers and @blocktrades this continues to improve. The next step for building will be to add more marketing and value adding teams to the chain. That is why this proposal will be made with two parts to it.

Part 1: We should be utalizing ad revenue from hive.blog and hive.io to buy hive and fund marketing efforts.

We have seen from some sectors of the hive blockchain how effective it is to add some discreet but valuable ad revenue to the system and use it to fund the project. The best example of this is the @leofinance tribe who have made incredible gains since adding ad revenue to the site. (As well as all of their other valuable work)

A lot of this revenue depends on having an attractive space for advertisers to place ads. Including features, such as:

• Large user base.
• Multiple sites
• Variety of content
• Worldwide appeal
• High alexa ranking (Currently 24,851. Quite strong.)
• Niche market (Can be a base for crypto advertising and crypto advertising companies.)

All of which we have already.

Hive.io is ranked 136,612 Peakd.com is ranked 40,589 and for reference @leofinance was 817,604 90 days ago and has moved to 350,899. This is their latest ad revenue post and it is only increasing month on month. [Leo ad report September2020](https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@leofinance/september-ad-report-crushing-all-time-highs-for-daily-ad-revenue) >The total numbers for the month of September. We generated $555.53 USD in ad revenue last month which is about 3,472.04 HIVE at current prices. The ad revenue is paid out in BTC. Each month we buy HIVE with the BTC and then purchase LEO from the LeoDex and burn it.

This is only a starting point and an idea of the power of external revenue. My idea is slightly different as I would like to receive the revenue generated from the ads and use it to drive even more users and traffic to the hive.blog site over time. Organically grow the revenue and keep using it to expand our reach and brand on a consistent basis.

While $550 might not seem like a huge amount it is still over 4000 Hive that could be bought from the market today and a starting point for further buys. I would like to grow this revenue to the point that we are buying $50,000 off the market on a monthly basis or over 400,000 at current prices. Imagine over 4,000,000 for 2021.

That is an amount that would get peoples attention.

We need to start somewhere and for a dev team as talented as we have for hive.blog I am sure it would be no great challenge to incorporate a few ads to generate the revenue.

There are multiple options out there to incorporate these ads and businesses set up to make it a smooth transition.

1. Coinzilla
2. Ad shares
3. Bitmedia
4. Cointraffic
5. Ad Dragon
   

All of which pay out in crypto and could be used for this initiative.

Part 2: Use the DAO fund marketing efforts.

I have brought up the ad revenue point on many occasions as have many other users since we saw hive created. For some reason there doesn't seem to be huge appetite to monetize our greatest asset and use it for growth.

With that being the case I have linked a proposal to this post to give an alternative way to generate funds for marketing and brand growth.

I would much rather see external revenue being used for this but at some stage we do need to start trying to bring more users in to the system. Unfortunately without this being used to create revenue it is a self defeating purpose as we will have more people selling and still not creating any buy pressure on the token to bring up the price.

If the proposal was funded from the DAO it would be used in the best interests of bringing in more users but looking long term it would be much better to create a long term sustainable budget for expanding our brand.

Project description

What I would ask for starters is to show if there is the support for more advertising and marketing efforts by supporting the proposal. (That means hit that support button.)

The idea being that,

1. The dev team will see there is a community appetite for advertising and using it to market this space.

or

2. The proposal gains enough support organically that some funding becomes available to start more marketing efforts.

   
   

The higher that we as a community vote this proposal the stronger the argument becomes for having a marketing budget and use it to bring more value into the system.

The long term vision would be to create enough revenue to have a full time position as an advertising and marketing representative for the hive eco-system with community support. Create enough funds to support others in their marketing efforts.

Create marketing and promotional tools for others to use in these endevours. Build a strong team of individuals with the purpose of expanding the hive brand and creating more awareness of what is being built on chain.

Short term plans:

• Fund onboarding initiatives.
• Create regular incentives for people to post to hive.blog and increase use.
• Create a buy pressure on the hive token and increase it's price.
• Build ad revenue over time to become self sustainable as a marketing fund.
• Fund development competitions to expand development on hive.
• Pay for advertising to reach new audiences.
• Increase use of hive.blog.
• increase active hive membership.
• Work with interested indiviuals to build the eco-system.
• Create partnerships with other hive apps and grow together.

Long term goals:

• Work on marketing and partnerships as a full time job.
• Create a hive marketing team.
• Run content feeds into other web2 sites like twitter, facebook and reddit. (Increase traffic)
• Create a marketing pack for people to receive and attend appropriate events.
• Create a marketing budget to subsidize attendance at important events.
• Create a resource to help users resolve issues and problem solve hive issues.
• Liaise with other crypto based businesses and build the hive brand.
• Create a regular buy pressure on the hive token to help increase the token price.
• Become the foremost social and dapp centered blockchain for other projects to build on.
• Build ad revenue to 100k per month.
• Build our community to 1M active members.
• Include a way to reward posts that drive the most traffic back to the site and incentivize good quality and lasting work.
  

There are lots of ways to do this with some funding but building a solid and active userbase will be the key in sustained growth. We need to start looking at a 5 year plan for hive and set targets for growth to match our ambitions. Obviously these will not be easy and will require long term planning and dedication to achieve. However at the moment we are doing very little and a start needs to be made at some point.

For example:

It would be great to see a $100 dollar competition every week for the various communities. Promotion for other projects, sometimes just for fun. Give back to the community and use it to grow as most people who try joining see no rewards/ engagement at the beginning and leave straight away. If we are going to incentivize a platform there needs to be a chance for new users to be seen and heard. Otherwise we will never leave the echo chamber.

$100 prize for best deep dive into $LEO, best review of @rabona, our latest app, best guide to buying bitcoin ect.... SEO focused articles to feed traffic back to the site. Market on other crypto based sites. Try to bring in users from other sites such as publishOx and flote.

All of these would have multiple uses as they would also market those projects to a wider audience while driving traffic to the site. They could be the basis for more partnerships for projects wanting to use our creators as a launch pad for more publicity. They could be away to create change in this world with enough people behind them.

Expand our reach and give people a reason to post here.
They will want to get involved.
They just need a push.
Just look at my most popular tweet all week. 4,600 impressions, 14 comments and 27 retweets for a 500HP delegation. What would it be for 500 HIVE? This is a tweet filled with links back to hive.blog and creates even more traffic for the site and increase potential earnings.

I guarantee with more efforts like this we would see plenty of people following the links back to hive.blog and joining the chain.

All of this has a cumulative effect for our brand and token price as they feed into each other as we build.

Costs

Depending on the @blocktrades team being willing to insert the ad space into the existing sites or whether funds become available through the proposal system, this would vary slightly.

If ads were to be implemented there would be the initial start up cost of time/money from the development team. Deciding on which ad service to use as the most suitable for the platform.

There would be no cost to fund the proposal.

As a regular cost I would take 10% of funds available for payment and to cover personal expenses in running these initiatives. While this would be very little at the beginning, the plan would be to grow this revenue over time and earn 10% of the much higher value being brought to the system through the marketing efforts.

I would also like to source strong analytics for hive.blog to maximize these efforts and help make the process of advertising revenue even more effective and profitable.

If income could be brought to a significant level then it would allow me to work on the efforts full time as well as bring in more people to expand those efforts.

If the proposal was to get funded it would only be until ad revenue reaches a stage where the team becomes self sustainable in it's efforts and can move forward based on the work put in to building the project.

Progress reporting

As this process would involve community funds in one form or another it is important that there would be total transparency for everybody involved in the process.

I would want there to be no doubts that the funds were being used in the best possible manner for marketing the hive eco-system and reaching the goals stated above.

With this in mind there would need to be a full breakdown on a monthly basis that would include:

• Advertising statistics.
• Advertising revenue.
• Breakdown of costs.
• Use of funds.
• Results of these initiatives.

This would be done in the same way as anybody working in a professional setting and who is using company funds for a project.

For this proposal I will be using the account,

@hive-blockchain

To keep any funds separate from my own and provide transparency of transactions. It also gives off a more professional appearance when interacting with other accounts for marketing purposes.

Principals

Principle on the proposal at the moment is just myself but part of putting this together is in the hope of bringing more people into the project for ideas and help to make it a success. As this is just stage 1, I felt it more important to put this together for the beginning and a team can be filled out moving forward.

This is obviously dependent on interest from the community itself and hopefully the dev teams operating at the other end of the spectrum.

All ideas and suggestions are welcome to see if the support is out there for this initiative. I already know of a lot of users who want to see something like this being put together but I would also like to know if this is supported by the wider community.

If there are ideas / suggestions to improve upon the idea.
If anybody is interested in getting involved.

Project Summary

In summary the main points of this proposal are.

• To gauge interest in more marketing and advertising initiatives.
• To push for ad revenue on hive.blog and any other relevant hive sites.
• To oversee those funds for the marketing and promotion of hive as stated above.
• In one form or another to use any funds received for furthering the expansion and brand of the hive eco-system.
• To drive token price through expanding our userbase, brand, use case and partnerships.

With this in mind please vote for this proposal and show the community how important it is that we start to work on a plan for the next five years to grow our eco-system and showcase the best of what is on offer to a larger audience.

I think it is vital that we start this now and stop the slide of Hive before it becomes too late. Our community is and always has been our unique selling point as a chain so let's utilize that to the fullest extent and monetize what we spend so much time creating for the benefit of that community.

At $2 Hive i guarantee we would see a lot more activity around the space and a lot of old faces returning very fast.

Higher price = More users More users = More ad revenue More ad revenue = More investors More Investors = Higher Price

It really is a win-win to incorporate ads into the site and use it to build.

You can support the proposal at:

• Peakd

• Hive.blog

• Hive DAO

I can be reached at any time for questions. On Hive: @niallon11 On twitter: https://twitter.com/hive_blockchain On discord: niallon11#6392

Thank you for your consideration. Let's grow hive together.