Preliminary Analysis of WagMedia’s Bounty #12 and Writer’s Room Payouts
I. Overview
Started by Jay Chrawnna (@GldnCalf), WagMedia (@thatMediaWag) is a media organization that facilitates the production of community-generated news and original articles and videos covering the Polkadot-Kusama ecosystem.
WagMedia employs Directors to review, curate, and disseminate the content produced by the community. The Directors also provide feedback where appropriate and grant awards to contributors based on quality and type of content and work. Funding for WagMedia from June through December 2022 was provided by the Kusama treasury Bounty #12.
This article analyzes the data on WagMedia’s Bounty #12 payouts, with a focus on investigating how the funds were spent and where they went.
Section II examines payouts by department and content type. It is about what types of work were produced and paid for by WagMedia.
Section III examines payouts (to contributors) granted by each WagMedia Director. It is about who approved the awards and for what types of work.
Section IV examines payouts to WagMedia contributors. It is about who received the payouts and how much.
Section V examines payouts for the Writer’s Room. Led by PNin (@BalanceBorn), the Writer’s Room provides a venue within WagMedia for content creators to present drafts of their original work to obtain edits, information, and feedback from WagMedia creators and directors. The venue also facilitates knowledge sharing among the participants. Funding for the Writer’s Room was provided initially from Bounty #12 but was subsequently separated into its own treasury.
Data for this article is based on native spreadsheets for the Bounty #12 and Writer’s Room treasuries, corresponding to data reported publicly on https://report.wagmedia.xyz/. The spreadsheet for Bounty #12 contains data from June 8, 2022 through December 6, 2022. The spreadsheet for the Writer’s Room contains data from July 19, 2022 through November 30, 2022.
Many thanks to Jay and PNin for the data and discussions. The numbers in the data and calculations reported in this article are not audited, certain numbers are approximated and subject to different interpretations and potential errors.
II. Payouts by Department
Tables 1a-b show the distribution of Bounty #12 payouts by each department in KSM and USD. The USD value was approximated on a monthly basis using the average daily exchange rate.
In total, Bounty #12 provided 11,248 KSMs in awards (approximately $457,277), with an average payout of 1.76 KSMs per award (approximately $71).
The Language department, which processes non-English content and translations, paid out the most, and accounted for 42% of total payouts, with 4,698 KSMs awarded from June 8, 2022 through December 6, 2022.
The Finders department, which processes news, rumors, and events, generated the highest number of contributions (3,170).
The number of contributions is calculated based on the “messageLink” field in the data, where each unique “messageLink” counts as one contribution. For example, an excerpt of the Bounty #12 data below shows that I made four contributions (identified by four unique messageLinks) for which I received 8.15 KSMs (sum of “value”).
The Directors department had the highest average payout at 55.33 KSMs per award (approximately $3,010).
The department was classified according to the “source” field in the data.
Language: “language” or “translatoors”
WagMedia: “WagMedia”
Creators: “Creators” or “content”
Directors: “Directors”
Finders: “news-rumors” or “events”
Marketing: “Marketing”
Table 2 shows the distribution of Bounty #12 payouts to each department by month. (Note that June and December are partial months).
Table 3 examines the Creators department payouts by content type. NFTs and Metaverse content received 330 KSMs (approximately $15,463), with an average payout of 1.09 KSMs (approximately $51). Similar awards were provided for DeFi content within the Creators department.
Tables 4a-b examine the Language department’s payouts by language type. Spanish content received the most payouts, 864 KSMs (approximately $35,544), with an average payout of 6.49 KSMs (approximately $267), followed by Portuguese and German content.
III. PAYOUTS BY DIRECTOR
Table 5 shows the Bounty #12 payouts (to contributors) granted by each WagMedia Director. To be clear, these numbers are outflows of payments to contributors, not inflows of payments to Directors. It is about who approved the awards and for what types of work.
For example, as reported in Table 5, Jay Chrawnna approved the disbursement of 6,119 KSMs from Bounty #12, CSaint02 approved 906 KSMs, and so on.
Table 6-7 show the payouts awarded by each Director in each Department.
Table 8 shows the average award per contribution by each Director in each Department. The table allows for a comparison of payouts approved by Directors within the same department (e.g., the average award in each department vs. individual directors). This comparison, however, does not control for potential differences in the quality and type of content produced within and across departments.
IV. PAYOUTS BY CONTRIBUTOR
This section reports the Bounty #12 payouts to WagMedia contributors. It is about who received the payments and how much. In total, there were 256 contributors to WagMedia that received a Bounty #12 payout from June 8, 2022 through December 6, 2022.
Table 9 shows that the top ten contributors received 46% of the KSMs awarded to all contributors, the top 25 received 68% of KSMs, and so on. The Appendix lists all contributors and their payouts from Bounty #12. The appendix shows that many contributors had relatively low payouts, mostly due to their primary contributions being in the Finders department.
As noted in the Appendix, a number of the top payees were WagMedia directors who received funding through Bounty #12 to fund other initiatives, and therefore, the payouts recorded in the data overstate the actual payouts for these payees.
Table 10 shows that more than 50% of contributors received less than 5 KSMs, with 134 contributors receiving less than 5 KSMs and 78 contributors receiving less than 1 KSM.
V. WRITER’S ROOM PAYOUTS
The Writer’s Room payouts reflect the contributions to the submission, editing, and commenting on drafts of original content submitted in the room. Payouts are determined by PNin.
As reported in Table 11, there were 261 contributions in the Writer’s Room that received a payout from July 19, 2022 through November 30, 2022. The total payout was 157.5 KSMs (approximately $5,794), with an average payout of 0.6 KSMs (approximately $22).
Table 12 provides a list of all contributors who received a payout in the Writer’s Room (to the extent that they are reported in the Writer’s Room data from July 19 through November 30, 2022). In total, there were 34 contributors to the Writer’s Room.
APPENDIX
The Appendix provides a list of all contributors who received a payout in Bounty #12 (to the extent that they are reported in the Bounty #12 data from June 8 through December 6, 2022).
Many of the top payees are WagMedia directors, who were paid for running WagMedia in addition to any contributions they make as individuals to WagMedia.
(*) A portion of payouts to Dodow and Pnin were used to fund other WagMedia initiatives (Weekly Newsletter and Writer’s Room), and therefore, their numbers overstate their true payouts. There may be other WagMedia directors for which this applies.
