WagMedia 2024 Data Report Volume 5: June 25 - July 24, 2024
WagMedia’s funding of content production concluded its fifth cycle, and with it, the first two-thirds of the funding period. We now have 4 weeks remaining. Thanks to all the viewers, creators, and affiliates for participating in WagMedia!
This report covers data on production, payouts, and top content for the period, June 25 through July 24, 2024.
For my data reports on the previous four cycles, see: Data Report 1, Data Report 2, Data Report 3, and Data Report 4.
Summary
For this period, WagMedia generated the production of 41 original content, 4 newsletters, and 104 news finds. The total payout for these content was 686 DOT.
WagMedia posts a subset of the produced content, as well as other news, articles, and data on the Polkadot ecosystem, on X (@thatMediaWag). In July 2024, @thatMediaWag made 291 posts and generated over 116,000 views and over 6,000 engagements on X.
WagMedia also posts on its website, as well as on Grill and Substack:
https://thewagmedia.com/
https://grillapp.net/12332?ref=9866
https://substack.com/@wagmediaweekly
In total, from the start of the 2024 funding period in February through July 25, 2024, WagMedia has produced over 180 original content (in English), over 30 non-anglo original content, and 20 newsletters as well as a proprietary website (https://thewagmedia.com/) and updated payout bot.
On X, @thatMediaWag has made over 1,200 posts and generated over 550,000 views, over 30,000 engagements, and over 500 new followers from January through July 2024.
More details on WagMedia’s production and payouts, along with links to top content, are described in the report and appendix below.
Creator Production and Payouts
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
Goku directs the Original Content unit. For the period June 25 through July 24, 2024, 14 creators produced a total of 41 original content (in English) for WagMedia.
The total payouts for these content was 359 DOT (USD value of $2,297), of which 18 bounty content accounted for 174 DOT (USD value of $1,129), 14 reporting content accounted for 92 DOT ($591), 3 retroactive content accounted for 74 DOT ($459), and 6 meme art accounted for 18 DOT ($118). The average payout per content was 8.75 DOT (USD value of $56). The payout for each content ranged from 0.5 to 34 DOT.
For bounty content, creators submit content on a topic set by the director of the unit (Goku), with a pre-set prize pool and deadlines to incentivize the timely production of content covering a topic of interest in the Polkadot ecosystem. Creators who submit the best content are awarded a payout according to the prize pool. Through July 25, 2024, there have been 128 bounty content produced, including 18 produced during this period.
The highest-paid bounty content for this period (22.3 DOT, USD value of $145) was an article by @gbaciX: https://x.com/gbaciX/status/1808207074435715532
The article described “how Polkadot will be able to process transactions as fast as Solana without making any trade-offs,” referencing an interview of @rphmeier by @GldnCalf (https://x.com/TheKusamarian/status/1804907252945768649).
For retroactive content, creators submit content covering a topic of their choice for evaluation to WagMedia after some period of time (e.g., after publicizing their work, generating engagement and viewership). Creators are awarded a payout for content that sufficiently meets WagMedia’s directive, adds value, and/or generates significant engagement and viewership. By only rewarding well-engaged and well-written pieces, this structure incentivizes creators to focus heavily on quality over quantity as well as mitigating content spamming and farming.
The highest-paid retroactive content for this period (34 DOT, USD value of $211) was an article by @EmilKietzman on Polkadot 2.0, including a summary of RFC-0092 regarding reducing the DOT un-bonding period from 28 days to as low as 2 days.
https://x.com/EmilKietzman/status/1804887128431559101
For reporting content, WagMedia invites several of its established creators to collect, summarize, and present data relevant to Polkadot’s ecosystem, and to publish the content on @thatMediaWag.
The highest-paid reporting content for this period (13 DOT, USD value of $83) was an article by @sanchzeph on liquid staking platforms on @Polkadot.
https://x.com/thatMediaWag/status/1787168811260719537
For meme art, creators are invited to create meme art and the best memes shared also have a chance to get a repost from @Polkadot and/or @thatMediaWag. The topic for this period was Polkadot x Chicken, whereby Polkadot is powering @origin_trail tracking the supply chain of poultry, 6 creators produced meme art with an average payout of 3 DOT (USD value of $20).
News
Dodow directs the News unit. For this 4-week period, the Finder’s Program collected 34 events watch and 70 news content, including those covering DeFi, governance, memes, and NFTs in the Polkadot ecosystem. The News unit also produced 4 newsletters. The average cost to produce each newsletter was approximately 76 DOT (USD value of $481) and the average payout for each find was 0.2 DOT (USD value of $1). In total, the News unit paid approximately 327 DOT (USD value of $2,059) 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 four newsletters published during this period were produced by three people: Dodow, Sanchez, and yay.oi. Each section is attributed to the corresponding author.
The newsletters can be accessed through WagMedia’s website:
“Secure DOT Value!” (June 25, 2024): https://thewagmedia.com/post/secure-dot-value-1719345640236
“Eventually experience from DOT bounties!” (July 2, 2024): https://thewagmedia.com/post/eventually-experience-from-dot-bounties-1719954340865
“Kolkadot!” (July 9, 2024): https://thewagmedia.com/post/kolkadot-1720525494690
“DOT’s Decoded!” (July 16, 2024) https://thewagmedia.com/post/dot-decoded-1721157269699
The News Unit also turns selected stories in the newsletters into X articles published on @thatMediaWag in order to make the articles more accessible to the public and enable the creator to reach a wider audience.
Additional articles written by the corresponding authors can be accessed on WagMedia’s website:
Dodow: https://thewagmedia.com/creator/Dodow
Sanchez: https://thewagmedia.com/creator/Sanchez
yay.oi: https://thewagmedia.com/creator/yay.oi
Polimec
WagMedia has partnered with Polimec (@PolimecProtocol) to run bounties paid with PLMC to generate content covering Polimec. These content, as well as the PLMC payouts, are funded by Polimec (not by the Polkadot Treasury / OpenGov).
In total, WagMedia produced 8 original articles covering Polimec, with two of them produced during this period. (The previous 6 articles were covered in Data Report 4).
https://x.com/CryptMosh/status/1805403839123931438
https://x.com/bigiSMALLS01/status/1805381856667537555
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 June 25 through July 24, 2024. Total payout was $13,895 in USDT for this period, as reported below.
Dodow (@fashionistawong) directs the News unit and is the editor of the weekly newsletter.
Goku (@0xgoku_) directs the Original Content unit and runs its associated programs, including developing and running the bounties, commissions, retroactive rewarding, and other business development activities.
ikhaled28 (@ikhaled28) directs the Non-Anglo unit and the development of the WagMedia website and payout bot, as well as other essential activities needed to run WagMedia.
Vampsy (me) (@vampsyfear) publishes a monthly data report (like this one) on WagMedia’s production, payouts, and top content for the month.
Turing (@Tur1ngM4ch1n3) manages WagMedia’s X / Twitter account.
blink_n (@blink_nDoesDeFi) manages WagMedia’s treasury.
In additional to their main roles above, the directors and affiliates conduct various tasks as needed based on their expertise.
See Appendix A for data on the payouts in each prior period starting in February.
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 July 24, 2024, WagMedia has paid out 4,439 in DOT and 91,600 in USDT.
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 July 24, 2024, the WagMedia treasury held the following coins.
X / Twitter Stats
@Tur1ngM4ch1n3 manages WagMedia’s X / Twitter account.
From January through July 2024, WagMedia made over 1,000 posts and generated over 0.5 million impressions and over 30,000 engagements as of July 31, 2024.
For the month of July 2024, @thatMediaWag made 291 posts and generated over 116,000 impressions and over 6,000 engagements.
While the X / Twitter stats reported here 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. See Appendix B for a further note on this topic.
Appendix A
A summary of the 2024 data on content production and payouts by unit and by period are reported in the tables below. For example, through July 24, 2024, the Original Content Unit has produced 183 original content, including 128 bounty content; and the News Unit has produced 20 weekly newsletters to date. More details on each period are provided in the Data Reports (including this one above, and the four previous reports linked at the top of this report).
A summary of payouts to date (in USD value) by unit are reported in the table and chart below. All units support content creation and publication.
Appendix B
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 analyses. For example, if you are trying to sell a superyacht, it is probably more effective to reach 10 people who can actually buy it rather than 100,000 people who cannot buy it.
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 sardines, for example, and they would not find it worthwhile to go after higher value fish, such as 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 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.