umarkhan

The validity of bounty campaigns has been called into question within the blockchain community. While some feel that bounties are a successful kind of social outreach, others feel that their value to the city must certanly be reconsidered.

How can we come together to balance the upsides of reward contrary to the moral responsibility inherent in accurately portraying the excitement surrounding a token sale?

What Is a Bounty Campaign?

Bounty campaigns are an advertising tactic wherein potential contributors perform promotional activities with respect to a task inturn for a share of the project's tokens. The advantages of this kind of marketing include:

• Inexpensive advertising for the ICO
• Increase of brand awareness
• Potential increase in eventual contributions

Projects aren't required to invest any money on a bounty campaign until their ICO has reached an effective conclusion. Once their sale has ended, the project distributes tokens which likely could have been burnt anyway.

The Problem with Bounty Campaigns

Bounty campaigns were useful when the community was small. Such advertising was extremely efficient and became among the default tools employed by ICOs. As the amount of ICOs increased in the last year, so did the amount of enthusiasts thinking about reaping the rewards of bounty participation. Thus, the professional “ICO bounty hunter” was born.

Most projects have bounty managers who are in charge of coordination and communication with participants, along with the last distribution of tokens. The demand for successful bounty managers led to many identical bounty campaigns being launched. As managers were stretched thin, quality started to fade and only quantity. Despite initially being a tool to attract core contributors and increase the current presence of the project in the media, bounties have now converted into something a lot more sinister.

Professional bounty hunters who care no more than the reward have replaced individuals who would once have already been authentic influencers, participating because they sincerely believed in the project. Reposts on social support systems, articles of dubious quality, and other irrelevant content on the topic of ICOs is created by individuals who cannot convey any authentic excitement to the project's target audience. The result is that most serious projects have chosen to abandon bounty campaigns for other promotional tools.

The Future of Bounty Campaigns

Future services will refocus their time onto accumulating bounty participants who will produce high-quality content for distribution throughout the network. Thus, we will return to the practice of targeting placement amongst bloggers as opposed to blind attempts to work with everyone in the hope of attaining the rare individual who is genuinely thinking about a project's message.

The largest obstacle to the transformation is the unwillingness of professional bloggers to work for the project's tokens, preferring rewards in fiat or bitcoin instead. This preference is due to a insufficient confidence in each project, or as time goes by utility of the tokens offered. A move towards a new paradigm of bounty campaigns is good for everyone. Projects will spend more of their tokens for fundraising activities rather than on content that fails to achieve their target audience. Bloggers will write more frequently about projects they truly rely on, making their words more convincing and ultimately increasing their rewards.