Data on WagMedia's NFT Content Creators Guild: May - July 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 May through July 2023. (The payout date lags the publication date). The previous articles examined the corresponding data for the period December 2023 through February 2023 and March through April 2023.
From May through July 2023, 20 content creators produced 52 original content for the NFT Guild. The Guild also ran its third, fourth, and fifth special topics bounties, designed to entice the timely creation of content focusing on topics that are of particular interest to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The third special topics bounty was a call to create an infographic on the Polkadot-Kusama ecosystem, with a prize pool of $450 for the top 5 submissions. The fourth was a call to write about non-RMRK NFT tech, with a prize pool of $850 for the top 5 submissions. The fifth was a call to write about reputational avatars, with a prize pool of $675 for the top 4 submissions.
Payouts
From May through July 2023, the NFT Guild awarded approximately 148 KSM for 52 content, with an average payout of 2.85 KSMs per content.
The average payout increased by approximately 1 KSM from March - April 2023 and by approximately 2 KSMs from December 2022 through February 2022. The increase in payouts is mostly due to the higher payouts for the special topics bounties and the availability of “standard” payments since the NFT Guild was funded by OpenGov in January 2023. Content published prior to funding approval was awarded at 50% of the standard rate.
The payouts from May through July 2023 ranged from a low of 0.5 KSMs to a high of 4.0 KSMs for standard content and a low of 2.6 KSMs to a high of 14.1 KSMs for content that won the special topics bounties. The payouts also depend on the creator’s “tier” and assessed quality of the content shortly after publication.
Creators
Among the 20 creators who produced original content for the NFT Guild, the average payout per creator was approximately 2.9 KSMs. As reflected in the table below, creators who won the special topics bounties tend to have higher average payouts.
Special Topics Bounties
The data for content produced for the special topics bounties are reported in the tables below. The live links are provided in Appendix 1 below.
In total, the special topics content generated more than 10,000 views on X / Twitter.
Use of Social Media Statistics
It is important to note that while data on views and statistics that are freely available on Twitter and other social media are informative and easy to access, content generating higher views are not necessarily more valuable than those with lower views. 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 small and easily-catchable fish, like anchovies. They would not find it worthwhile to go after bigger and harder-to-catch 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 data on content scores were provided by the NFT Guild.
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 include those from April through July 2023 (and do not fully match the contents in the May through July payouts data above).
In total, the NFT Guild evaluated and scored 91 content from April through July 2023, of which 51 were produced by Tier 2 creators and 40 were produced by Tier 3 creators.
The table below reports the 10 highest scoring content during this period. The top 10 had scores of 49.5 or more. The live links to them are provided in Appendix II.
Appendix 1: Links to Special Topics Bounty Winners
Special Topics Bounty #3: "Infographic on Polkadot-Kusama Ecosystem"
https://twitter.com/Tomitzu/status/1652759305391570945?s=20
https://twitter.com/ProphetDotsama/status/1651553245427564544?s=20
https://twitter.com/__open_minded/status/1652655479158460419?s=20
https://twitter.com/sanchzeph/status/1652431935342526464?s=20
https://twitter.com/bigiSMALLS01/status/1652202614237396998?s=20
Special Topics Bounty #4: "Non-RMRK NFT Tech"
https://sanchzeph.medium.com/how-unique-are-your-nfts-46695057bed
https://medium.com/@Tomitzu/the-polkadot-nfts-a-song-of-pallets-and-standards-103623dafb2c
https://prophetdotsama.medium.com/ajuna-network-a-promising-gaming-blockchain-597343b85f23
https://thedigitalquill.medium.com/a-glance-into-non-rmrk-nft-standard-tech-in-the-polkadot-ecosystem-33d9fc7e1727
Special Topics Bounty #5: "Reputational Avatars"
https://twitter.com/kanbeok/status/1664769173560360960?s=20
https://twitter.com/TheScarletThr/status/1666571537082720259?s=20
https://twitter.com/__open_minded/status/1666584377407447040?s=20
https://twitter.com/patrick_bankole/status/1667983617643929604?s=20
Appendix II: Links to Top-Scoring Content
https://twitter.com/AlphAirdrop/status/1646850544944967681
https://prophetdotsama.medium.com/what-makes-a-web3-gaming-nft-collection-successful-864e0694162e
https://medium.com/@Tomitzu/what-makes-ajunas-gaming-nft-collection-successful-41283ba69baf
https://twitter.com/sanchzeph/status/1683222863703158785
https://twitter.com/ProphetDotsama/status/1648663719734550528
https://twitter.com/ProphetDotsama/status/1651553245427564544
https://twitter.com/ProphetDotsama/status/1665250986536099840
https://medium.com/@Tomitzu/the-polkadot-nfts-a-song-of-pallets-and-standards-103623dafb2c