Data on WagMedia's NFT Content Creators Guild: March - April 2023
I. Overview
Originally led by PNin (https://x.com/BalanceBorn?s=20), the NFT Content Creators Guild (“NFT Guild”) focuses on producing original content, research, and analyses of NFT projects and technologies, digital art and collectibles, and other related genres.
Approved for funding via the Kusama Governance in January 2023, the NFT Guild has a budget of 2,657 KSMs for 26 weeks. (https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/70)
The data on content production and payouts are based on a native spreadsheet for WagMedia’s NFT Guild treasury, reported publicly on https://report.wagmedia.xyz/.
The data and calculations reported in this article are not audited, and certain numbers are approximate and subject to different interpretations and potential errors. Please let me know (@vampsyfear) if you see any errors.
II. Content Production
This article focuses on content for which a payout was awarded from March through April 2023. (The payout date lags the publication date). The previous article examined the corresponding data for the period December 2023 through February 2023.
From March through April 2023, 23 content creators produced 54 original content for the NFT Guild, of which 12 were videos and 42 were articles and/or threads.
The NFT Guild also ran two special topics bounties, designed to entice the timely creation of content focusing on topics that are of particular interest to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The first special bounty was a call to write about the “top 3 NFT collections with utility in Dotsama,” with a prize pool of $175 for 1st place, $125 for 2nd place, and $100 for 3rd place. This bounty led to the submission of 6 articles and threads.
The second special bounty was a call to provide an “analysis of what makes certain gaming NFT collections successful (with examples from Dotsama),” with a prize pool of $225 for 1st place, $150 for 2nd place, and $100 for 3rd place. This bounty led to the submission of 7 articles and threads.
Payouts
The Guild paid approximately 75 KSM in total for all 54 content, with an average payout of 1.77 KSMs per video and 1.27 KSMs per article and thread.
The payouts ranged from a low of 0.15 KSMs to a high of 3.0 KSMs for video and a low of 0.09 KSMs to a high of 6.81 KSMs for articles and threads. The higher payouts on articles and threads reflect the special topics bounties.
The distribution of the payouts are reported below. For example, less than 25% of videos received a payout of 2.4 KSMs or more, and less than 25% of articles and threads received a payout of 1.80 KSMs or more. The payouts depend on the creator’s “tier” and assessed quality of the content shortly after publication.
Creators
From March through April 2023, 23 creators produced original content for the NFT Guild. In total, 74.70 KSMs were paid out, which works out to an average of 1.38 KSMs per creator. The data on each creator are reported below.
Special Topics Bounties
The data for content produced for the special topics bounties as well as links to access the content and their Twitter stats (as of May 14, 2023) are reported in the tables below. The live links to the winning articles are provided in Appendix 1 below.
The first bounty led to 6 content created and 3 winners. In total, through May 14th, the contents generated over 11,000 views, with the winners generating more than 10,000 views.
The second bounty led to 7 content created and 3 winners. In total, through May 14th, the contents generated close to 9,000 views, with the winners generating approximately 4,000 views.
The table below provides a comparison between the special topics bounty winners and the standard articles and threads in terms of Twitter statistics. On average, content that won the special topics bounty was viewed almost 3 times as much as the standard articles and threads produced by the NFT Guild.
In terms of total engagement on Twitter, the 6 winning articles and threads generated approximately 15,000 additional views (as of May 13, 2023) for the NFT Guild.
Use of Social Media Statistics
It is important to note that while Twitter (and other freely-available social media) stats are informative and easy to access, content generating higher stats are not necessarily more valuable than those with lower stats. This is because the value of engagement varies across audiences (e.g., not all views have equal value). For example, content that gets 10 views and generates $1,000 in sales is arguably more valuable than content that gets 1,000 views but only generates $100 in sales. In this sense, content that is highly targeted to a small group can sometimes be more valuable than content targeting a wider audience, and vice versa. A more sophisticated tracking technology is needed to inform the ultimate value of content.
When analyzing data, it is important to keep in mind what you can see in the data versus what you cannot see, and adjust how much weight you place on the data accordingly. In analogy, if you hire two fishermen and receive data that one caught 1,000 fish and the other caught 10 fish, how would you use that data to determine how much to pay them?
If they are both fishing from the same pond with only one type of fish, you can reasonably infer that one fisherman did much better than the other, and pay them accordingly. But if they were fishing in a large ocean, that data is useless because it does not tell you what type of fish they caught.
If you were to set up a reward mechanism that pays the fishermen based only on the number of fish they catch, they would be incentivized to go after fish that are easiest to catch. Your fishermen would be incentivized to only go after low-value fish, like sardines. They would not find it worthwhile to go after high-value fish, like bluefin tuna.
In the analogy above, “views” are more like how many fish saw your bait. This statistic may be a good indicator of how well you are doing when fishing in a small pond with only one type of fish (and the fish have a similar propensity to bite), but a very imperfect proxy when there are lots of different fishes in the ocean.
This example highlights the importance of designing a reward mechanism that can incentivize optimal behavior. If the payouts for content are rigidly based only on views and other stats that are freely available, this could sub-optimally incentivize creators to focus mostly on producing things that are popular versus balancing popularity and value.
In light of imperfect data, a better payout mechanism would consider various factors, in addition to the freely available stats (e.g., views, replies, etc.), to determine the payout. To this end, the NFT Guild has implemented a scoring mechanism in which content submitted to the guild is reviewed and evaluated by the directors to assess the quality of content.
III. Content Scores
The NFT Guild scores content produced within the guild. The scores are based on 6 factors: (1) Accuracy, (2) Ease, (3) Originality, Depth, and Relevance, (4) Presentation, (5) X-Factor, (6) AI Use / Plagiarism, with a score of 0 to 10 assigned to each factor. For (1) - (5), 10 is the best score, for (6), 0 is the best score. For the purposes of this article, the score for (6) was calculated as 10 minus the score, to make it comparable to the others. The scores for each factor were added, and in cases in which more than one reviewer scored the content, the scores were averaged.
The scores data loosely, but not fully, correspond to the data from the WagMedia treasury above, which are based on the payout date (which lags the publication date). Therefore, the scores reported in this article are limited to February through March 2023 (and do not match with the contents in the March through April payouts data above).
The data on content scores were provided by the NFT Guild. In total, there were 104 original content published from February through March 2023 that were given a score, of which 22 were produced by Tier 2 creators and 82 were produced by Tier 3 creators.
Tier 2 creators generally scored higher than Tier 3 creators, as reported in the figure below. For example, the top 25th percentile score for Tier 2 creators was 49.0 vs. 45.0 for Tier 3 creators.
The tables below show the content produced by Tier 2 and 3 creators scoring 48 points or more.
The live links to these top-scoring content are in the Appendix 2 below.
Appendix 1: Links to Special Topics Bounty Winners
Special Topics Bounty #1: "Top 3 NFT Collections with Utility from Dotsama"
https://sanchzeph.medium.com/top-3-nft-collections-with-utility-from-dotsama-a012995e4fb8
https://thedigitalquill.medium.com/top-utility-nft-collections-in-the-dotsama-ecosystem-79aef33704d0
https://theastarbulletin.news/top-nfts-collections-on-polkadot-e2c2f3f71442
Special Topics Bounty #2: "An analysis of what makes certain gaming NFT collections successful (with examples from Dotsama)"
https://medium.com/@Tomitzu/what-makes-ajunas-gaming-nft-collection-successful-41283ba69baf
https://prophetdotsama.medium.com/what-makes-a-web3-gaming-nft-collection-successful-864e0694162e
https://polkaverse.com/6144/secret-sauce-of-the-damned-pirates-society-37942
Appendix 2: Links to Top-Scoring Content
https://polkaverse.com/@pninja/veil-of-time-play-test-and-analysis-36829
https://twitter.com/ProphetDotsama/status/1625790249577361411
https://sanchzeph.medium.com/top-3-nft-collections-with-utility-from-dotsama-a012995e4fb8
https://theastarbulletin.news/top-nfts-collections-on-polkadot-e2c2f3f71442
https://twitter.com/SmDawudeen/status/1626103212586700800?t=i4uTSEDTy1PpkjIJYzpnBg&s=19
https://twitter.com/suryavamsi0912/status/1638635613778739201?s=20
https://twitter.com/kanbeok/status/1625262473208033280
https://twitter.com/Cesar_Ges/status/1625573471492222976
https://twitter.com/DeFiMayor/status/1627382733117984768?s=20
https://twitter.com/MichielB88/status/1628079998144851997?s=20
https://twitter.com/Abdulra49391530/status/1637788475276550144?t=v82GEKGz23uCtqynriEElA&s=19
https://twitter.com/SmDawudeen/status/1641003599131025408?t=2Sx7PK5qCRO3kj0rEq_k6Q&s=19