WagMedia 2024 Data Report Volume 1: Through March 24, 2024
WagMedia’s funding of content production has re-started! Thanks to all who participated in OpenGov to make this happen!
This report provides an overview of WagMedia and data on content production and payouts through March 24, 2024, the state of the WagMedia treasury and, and X / Twitter stats. It also provides a selected list of top content and links to them.
OVERVIEW
Intro to WagMedia
WagMedia (“WM”) is open to all content creators who produce articles or videos on topics related to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Content submitted to WagMedia are eligible for payouts and publication on various outlets, including X (@thatMediaWag), Substack (https://substack.com/@wagmediaweekly), and Grill (https://grillapp.net/12332).
Creators can submit their content for evaluation on WagMedia’s Discord: http://discord.gg/YUXqjVXWtp.
WagMedia’s Directors are: Dodow (@fashionistawong), Goku (@0xgoku_), ikhaled28 (@ikhaled28), and me, Vampsy (@vampsyfear).
The Directors perform a variety of functions related to the administration and management of WagMedia, such as directing and evaluating content from creators, procuring services and tools needed to operate WM from various affiliates and developers (e.g., payout bot, website, social media management), producing and distributing content (e.g., newsletter), and reports (like this one), among others.
WagMedia’s content production is organized into three units:
[1] Original Content: Directed by Goku, the Original Content unit produces original content in English.
[2] News: Directed by Dodow, this unit produces a weekly newsletter and collects news from a variety of sources.
[3] Non-Anglo Content: Directed by ikhaled28, this unit produces both original content in languages other than English and translations.
Role of WagMedia in the Polkadot Ecosystem
WagMedia is a publicly funded system that incentivizes the production of “public goods”-like content that would otherwise be under-funded by the “free market.” In January 2024, WM received funding of 26,058 DOT to manage and fund content for 26 weeks (https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/365).
For platforms like blockchain that rely on “network effects” (i.e., the blockchain gets more valuable as more people use it), subsidizing the early creators and users can help jump start the network effects.
By funding creators, WagMedia provides users with access to more content without any subscription fees or ads, which can help facilitate adoption of the Polkadot ecosystem, both by bringing in new people and by increasing the level of participation by people already in the ecosystem. (In fact, WagMedia is itself a platform, with content creators on one end and content consumers on the other end).
Another feature of WagMedia is that it alleviates OpenGov’s inability to enforce commitments for projects funded by the treasury. If the content creator is paid before the work is published, the creator has an incentive to under-deliver. If the creator is paid “retroactively,” after publication, OpenGov has an incentive to under-pay for the work, particularly for content that has already been freely released to the public.
Whether payment occurs before or after content production, they have a symmetric problem in that one side has an incentive to renege on their agreement. The more that one party has to rely on the other to follow through on their promise, the more that they can be exploited by the other. Game theoretically, the party who could get exploited anticipates this, which makes them less willing to put themselves in that situation. This ultimately makes it harder to engage in mutually beneficial transactions and leads to the underproduction of valuable goods and services.
IRL, countries / governments have alleviated this problem by establishing laws that enforces contracts to varying degrees. All else equal, the stronger the enforcement, the more people can enter into mutually beneficial contracts that rely on each party to do what they agreed to do. The law enables people to make credible commitments in that the seller can expect the buyer to pay the agreed upon amount (after shipment) and the buyer can expect to get the product that they ordered (after payment).
WagMedia similarly alleviates the lack of enforcement associated with OpenGov funding by enabling the payment to occur both in advance and retroactively. It does this by enabling OpenGov to put funds into escrow into WagMedia (prior to content production) and then relying on WM and its Directors’ reputation to award payments to individual creators “retroactively” (after production). Placing funds into escrow signals to creators that there is / will be funding for content that adds value to the Polkadot ecosystem, but the funds are distributed to individual creators based on the quality of their work, after the content is produced.
WagMedia also makes it more efficient for a wide variety of creators to get funding for their content, which, in turn, provides the community with access to content from a more diverse set of creators. While it can be feasible for certain large and well-known creators with a good reputation to submit their own proposal in OpenGov directly, this process is not often impractical for small or early-stage creators.
The figure above illustrates WagMedia’s platform. In simple terms, WM gets funding from OpenGov voters and enables content to be produced and viewed. In order to make this process work well, WagMedia’s Directors as well as Affiliates and Developers perform a variety of functions, some of which are noted in the figure.
PRODUCTION AND PAYOUTS
This article reports on transactions that occurred from the start of the 2024 funding period through March 24, 2024.
The data on content production and payouts are based on a native spreadsheet for WagMedia’s treasury, reported publicly on https://report.wagmedia.xyz/.
Content payouts are sent out “retroactively,” after the work is submitted / published. The USD values of content payouts made in DOT are approximated based on the DOT:USD exchange rate (the closing price) as of the date of transaction (i.e., when the payout is sent). These USD values are approximate in that the closing price for the day is assumed to be the exchange rate for all transactions that took place within that day. Therefore, while these USD values account for the volatility of crypto markets across different days, they do not account for the volatility within the same day.
The data and calculations reported in this article are not fully audited, and certain numbers are approximate and subject to different interpretations and potential errors. Please let me know (@vampsyfear) if you see any errors.
Original Content
For the 4-week period through March 24, 2024, 6 creators produced a total of 11 original content for WagMedia. The total payouts for these 11 content were 181.8 DOT (which amounts to USD value of $1,723.09), of which the 2 commissioned content accounted for 112.0 DOT (USD value of $1,049) and the 9 general content accounted for 69.8 DOT (USD value of $674).
For this 4-week period, Oyster (@OnlyDeFiGuy) was commissioned by WagMedia to write about topics related to DeFi in the Polkadot ecosystem. For commissioned content, a WagMedia Director invites a creator with a specialized knowledge to apply their expertise to write about topics that could be useful for the Polkadot community. For commissioned content, the Director(s) provide guidance and revision requests, and upon successful completion of the requested revisions, the content is published by WagMedia (e.g., in X, Substack, and webpage). Payouts for commissioned content are agreed to in advance and paid after successful completion of the work.
Oyster’s two commissioned contents are below. Each content was awarded a payout of 56 DOT (USD value of $525).
https://grillapp.net/12332/navigating-the-dark-forest-polkadot-s-mev-arena-86568
https://grillapp.net/12332/94106
For general content, creators submit their content for evaluation to WagMedia. The topic can be set by the creator or the directors. Creators are awarded a payout for content that sufficiently meets WagMedia’s directive. The amount of payout is based on the quality of work. The average payout for general content was 7.76 DOT (USD value of $75) during this period.
The two highest paid general content were awarded a payout of 10.5 DOT (USD value of $102), and were produced by @pitcoin_ and @mrkusama.
https://x.com/pitcoin_/status/1765529301523349827
https://x.com/mrkusama/status/1766484183700930924
News
For this 4-week period, the finder’s program collected 283 news content and the News unit produced 3 newsletters. The average cost to produce each newsletter was 43.80 DOT (USD value of $419) and the average payout for each find was 0.13 DOT (USD value of $1). In total, the News unit paid 167.57 DOT (USD value of $1,607) during this period.
The newsletter is edited by Dodow and covers all types of news and events related to Polkadot via the news program, and a selection of stories, including Top Story of the Week. Various creators contribute to writing the newsletter. Each week, Dodow selects a few notable contributors from the news program to write parts of the newsletter. The three newsletters published during this period were produced by six people: Dodow, Sanchez, yay.oi, Gigs, aemonk, and TuringM4chine.
The links to the newsletters are:
“Wag is Back!” (March 5, 2024):
“Agile Core Fun(d)!” (March 12, 02214):
“BangDOT!” (March 19, 2024):
Non-Anglo Content
For the 4-week period 5 creators produced a total of 13 non-anglo original content and 3 creators translated 3 content.
For the 13 non-anglo original content, the total payout to creators was 57.0 DOT (USD value of $539), which amounts to a per-content average of 4.38 DOT (USD value of $41). Total payout for the 3 translations was 10.0 DOT (USD value of $94), which amounts to an average of 3.33 DOT (USD value of $31) per translation.
The unit also awarded payouts to reviewers who evaluated the non-anglo content. In total, the reviewers were paid 7.56 DOT (USD value of $71), which amounts to an average of 0.50 DOT (USD value of $5) per review.
The highest paid non-anglo original content was a video produced by @NiixonJavier and was awarded a payout of 12 DOT (USD value of $112):
The second highest paid non-anglo original content was an article produced by @era_italia and was awarded a payout of 10 DOT (USD value of $94):
https://x.com/era_italia/status/1770402365486645431
Director Payouts and Operation Costs
The Directors conduct a variety of work themselves, including operating WagMedia, directing the various units within WagMedia, business development, and drafting articles and reports (like this one) as well as editing, evaluating, and paying for content and services. The Directors also communicate with each other on a near-daily basis to discuss any issues that come up and any significant decisions to be made, and to set the future direction of WagMedia.
In addition, as described above, WagMedia’s Directors vet and procure services from multiple people and vendors to perform various tasks, such as the development of websites and payout tools, and running social media, and managing the treasury as well as paying for certain types of costs.
Development work done through WagMedia is open source for all to use and available on GitHub: https://github.com/Wag-Media.
The table below reports the payouts to Directors, Affiliates, Developers and for other costs from February through March 24, 2024. These payouts cover work from January through March 24, 2024. A significant portion of these costs was attributable to startup costs, including to niftesty (affiliate) for the development of the website and related tools and to ikhaled28 (director) for his work and costs to pay for various services and restart WagMedia. Payouts are made in DOT and/or USDT. The USD value of director payouts and operation costs in DOT reflect the “Original USD Value” reported on polkadot.subscan.io for the corresponding transaction hash.
The total USD value of payment (DOT and USDT combined) was $35,405, of which $9,360 was for Director payouts and $26,045 was for affiliates, developers, website and server maintenance, and other costs.
Treasury
WagMedia received funding of 26,058 DOT from OpenGov on January 12,2024. Based on an exchange rate (closing price) of $7.57 USD per DOT on January 12, 2024, the approximate USD value of the funding as of that date was $197,259.
Through March 24, 2024, WagMedia has paid out 964 DOT and 30,061 USDT, which approximates to a total USD value of $39,448 based on the exchange rate as of the date of transaction.
WagMedia’s assets are held in multiple wallets. A portion of the initial funding from OpenGov was converted to stablecoins, including USDT and USDC. The remaining funds are kept in DOT, HDX, and BNC. WagMedia stakes a portion of its DOT, which generates additional DOT for the treasury. WagMedia also received an airdrop of DED.
blink_n (@blink_nDoesDeFi) manages the WagMedia treasury and records its holdings on a near-daily basis. As of March 24, 2024, the WagMedia treasury held the following coins.
X / TWITTER STATS
WagMedia’s X / Twitter account is managed by aemonk (@aemonk1). From January through March 2024, WagMedia made 175 posts and generated 60,596 impressions and 3,599 engagements. WagMedia also increased its follower count by 72 followers from February 20th to March 24th.
For the 4-week period from February 25th through March 24th, @thatMediaWag made 105 posts and generated 25,362 impressions and 1,526 engagements.
Over this 4-week period, 5 posts generated over 1,000 impressions. The data for each of these top posts (in terms of impressions)* and links are reported below. (*See the appendix below for a cautionary note on the interpretation of social media data).
Links:
https://twitter.com/thatMediaWag/status/1771286528905424897
https://twitter.com/thatMediaWag/status/1764011977960272069
https://twitter.com/thatMediaWag/status/1762229608026407299
https://twitter.com/thatMediaWag/status/1770174041212723289
https://twitter.com/thatMediaWag/status/1763308657343951204
Appendix on Interpretation of Social Media Data
While the X / Twitter stats reported above are easy to access and provide some guidance on the value of a post, because not all impressions and engagements have equal value, the true value of each post generally cannot simply be ranked based on the number of impressions or engagements. Ultimately, what determines the true value is the post’s incremental contribution in generating an action from the viewer and the benefits associated with that action. For example, if the goal of a post is to get people to buy DOT, a post that gets a view from a person that buys 10,000 DOT is more valuable than a post that gets a lot more views but only generates a total purchase of 1,000 DOT. That is, the value of views and engagements depends on the audience captured by the creator and content. Measuring actions and estimating the value of those actions requires the use of advanced tracking technologies and data analyses.
When analyzing and interpreting data, it is also important to keep in mind what you can see in the data versus what you cannot see. In analogy, if you hire two fishermen and receive data that one caught 1,000 fish and the other caught 10 fish, that data is not sufficient to assess which fisherman did better, or how much to pay them, because it does not tell you the 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. In that case, your fishermen would come back with a lot of tilapia and sardines, for example, and they would not find it worthwhile to go after higher value fish, such as bluefin tuna and king salmon.
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 it is 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 content payouts are rigidly based only on views and other stats that are readily available, this could sub-optimally incentivize creators to focus mostly on producing things that are popular versus balancing popularity and other factors that generate value, such as targeting a certain audience, depth of content, etc. In light of imperfect data, a better mechanism would consider various factors and proxies that could get at the overall value-added of the content. This is in large part the reason for WagMedia to reward content based both on impressions and engagement metrics as well as the quality and potential impact of the content as determined by the directors and reviewers.