Marketing Bounty Deep Dive

[jeeper]

UPDATE #1

Following multiple queries about NovaShots, I updated the table to show it under the Blast campaign (as well as some small spends that I missed regarding the blast campaign).

[CrapDao]

Was the cost justified? Every available metric says no.

What this entire exchange makes painfully clear is that some individuals in this ecosystem have operated with near-zero ethics.

Not outright theft, nothing that obvious, but a more subtle, more insidious dynamic: the quiet treasury grift built on overspending, inflated compensations, vague reporting, recycled partnerships, and zero accountability.

@ChrawnnaCorp, Crane , Leemo have become the clearest examples of this pattern.
And now that real data is finally surfacing, the picture is no longer ambiguous.

I sincerely hope Gavin Wood @gavofyork who always insisted on verified truth, can see this for what it is when the numbers are laid out plainly.

Because the ecosystem cannot move forward until we understand how this kind of behaviour was allowed to persist for so long.

[ChrawnnaCorp]

Hi, just to be clear, MB is funding ALL Kus operations (besides AAG & Space Monkeys), not just the Friday DOT News Pump as claimed.

Can you point out why you thought that?

MB relationship with Kus covers:

• Charts program
• Ref Deep Dives
• Shorts Episodes
• Software & operations
• Some Travel
• Equipment
• Promotion
• Event coverage (via WebZero)

Generally Kus has saved treasury money with below-market production. We are, however, highly productive, covering a wide range of ecosystem communication needs.

17 people work on the Kus in capacities ranging from double full time to very part time. All of our output and spending is meticulously documented and available for audit.

[Megadot]

Just to be clear, you haven’t contributed any funds to the Polkadot treasury for your below-market output. In fact, the treasury has spent millions on you with no clear KPIs or accountability. It’s concerning that you run a business at a loss, and honestly, the Polkadot ecosystem could function just fine without most of what you produce.

[ChrawnnaCorp]

I can appreciate your opinion but the fact remains that Kus has been funded maybe 8 times now based on the value of its past performance.

The business is a service of public comms for the network - just has many nations maintain. It’s not that we run The Kus at a loss but that the treasury IS our client, and we render services for its shareholders in exchange for payment.

Without The Kus and its platforms of public discourse, the volume & velocity of high quality information would be much different.

[Megadot]

Don’t overestimate your importance as the Polkadot ecosystem can function perfectly well without you.

I fully support pausing the marketing bounty for six months to measure its real impact on price and visibility. Also, it’s time for a complete reset: remove Crane and the current curators, and make sure they’re not reappointed to similar roles again.

[bane]

This reflects a real disparity: some individuals are earning $180K a year while many community members are still struggling to get by — yet we are told to “stay with Polkadot.” If people see this report, their confidence will inevitably be shaken. There isn’t a single video on developer experience, coretime transfers, or other topics that were supposed to be funded by the marketing bounty. I also don’t understand why the marketing bounty hasn’t supported small creators. They could have funded them with modest amounts instead of giving large sums to agencies that didn’t stay.

How was the decision made to launch a “blast campaign”? This bounty clearly isn’t for everyone; it feels driven by favoritism. No new teams are being funded, and those who are funded already have millions secured beforehand.

Hope people come forward and work on this bounty.

[bLd]

When the “public” of a media is just a few dozen insiders, it never hurts to question the efficiency of its propaganda organ. Especially when the propaganda doesn’t even serve a state power, but only its director’s personal interests.

Thank you for your tireless services to the Polkadot nation, but the weight largely outweighs the benefits.

Anyway, media is only one more item in the already long list of marketing bounty inefficient spendings that this report highlights.

[ChrawnnaCorp]

I’m sorry if it may feel that way for you.

The reality is, however, that Kus public platforms host the voices of 100s of unique individuals every quarter.

Here are the faces of just the people who participated in the first half of 2024 for example:

[Megadot]

Stop embarrassing yourself Kus

[flez]

jay, your reply leaves more questions than answers. maybe you can weigh in on the following instead of deflecting?

1. proof of misuse of funds (from your own spreadsheet)

your own “kus public broadcasting weekly costs of service” sheet shows:

• total spent: $253,512.32
• actual marketing (editing, thumbnails, advertising): $67,405.75
• company overhead (admin, direction, salaries, ops): $186,106.57
• percent not used for marketing: 73.4%

here is the part that matters:

for every $1 the treasury spent, only about 27 cents went to actual marketing/advertising. the other 73 cents went to The Kus’s company overhead.

none of these overhead costs fall under any MB-approved funding verticals. they were never eligible expenses to begin with (proof below):

in practice, the marketing bounty is currently subsidizing the internal payroll of private companies owned by their buddies, with no clear or measurable benefit delivered to polkadot.

this is the structural issue the community keeps raising.

---

2. the Kus campaign did not target real crypto users

the kus YT campaign ran almost entirely in the cheapest ad markets on earth for both months available in your public reports. the same regions most associated with low-intent, incentivized, or bot traffic. roughly 70-81 percent of all views came from india and indonesia alone, and only ~1-5 percent came from the US. and no targeting to the EU what-so-ever. is this a sick joke?

this isn’t a minor mistake… it’s a fundamental breakdown in the most basic part of advertising: who the ads are actually reaching.

and the bigger issue is what this implies:

either the kus does not understand even elementary targeting strategy,
or the curators approved this knowingly.

if they didn’t review targeting, that’s negligence.
if they did review it and approved it anyway, that’s worse.

either scenario makes one thing unavoidable:

this targeting alone is enough to conclude that the mb, as currently structured, cannot be trusted to manage polkadot’s marketing budget responsibly.

no marketing program in any serious ecosystem would consider this acceptable, let alone fund it a second time. in web2, this type of targeting decision making would get you fired if you were at a real marketing agency.

---

3. public reporting for The Kus stopped in february… everything after is a black box

srsly how long does it take you to collect data? this is totally unacceptable.

the last accessible invoices/reports for the kus × mb appear to be from february. everything after that is missing or listed as “collecting data.”

without ongoing public reporting, the community can’t verify:

• how funds are being used
• whether deliverables match proposals
• or whether conflicts of interest exist

on that note:

is crane being paid for his friday appearances? if yes, where are those invoices or transactions documented? how much are you paying the general manager of the mb for this?

why are you hiding performance/spend reports and invoices related to the work done with the funds from the MB and making people request access? what are you trying to protect?

and since you ignored this comment entirely, let me re-share so you can hopefully answer this publicly, since it’s probably on everyone’s mind:

the reality is after all that funding The Kus has received, any serious media company would have built real revenue streams like sponsors, ads, or paid subscribers, but that does not appear to be happening, just a steady stream of treasury money. are more asks incoming shortly? when will it end?

[ChrawnnaCorp]

Yikes. Flez this is fully dishonest.

“Editing, direction, salaries” These expenses are directly related to content creation. It costs money to make the content that everyone watches. It is the most costly part.

@flez

• total spent: $253,512.32
• actual marketing (ads + distribution): $67,405.75
• company overhead (editing, admin, direction, salaries, ops): $186,106.57
• percent not used for marketing: 73.4%

here is the part that matters:

for every $1 the treasury spent, only about 27 cents went to actual marketing/advertising. the other 73 cents went to The Kus’s company overhead.

How could content creation NOT count as funds used for marketing. What a odd suggestion.

This is entirely twisted - not in good faith.

It sidetracks the noble cause of auditing and cost reduction. Not worthy of anyone’s time.

[flez]

@ChrawnnaCorp you keep deflecting instead of addressing the actual points, and it is obvious at this stage

i did include editing in the calculation. it is right there in the screenshot. even if you also add posting, which is the only other item that could reasonably be counted, the overall picture barely changes. everything else you listed is basic overhead for your company. salaries, direction, admin, hosting, management fees… these are costs you would have whether the marketing bounty existed or not.

if the kus were a legitimate media company backed by external clients and independent revenue sources, these overhead costs would be covered internally like any normal business. instead, they are being pushed directly to the treasury.

so even with the most generous possible interpretation, the numbers still fail to show anything close to effective use of marketing funds, and every core issue remains exactly the same. your argument does nothing to change that.

still looking for answers to:

1. where are the reports and invoices after february?

2. why were your campaigns targeted almost entirely to the cheapest low-intent regions available? are you purposefully inflating your numbers with botted/useless traffic, or just unaware of how basic targeting works? if this is your idea of an effective strategy, the community deserves to hear the justification.

3. did you pay crane for his friday show appearances or not? yes or no. if yes, share the invoices.

[bLd]

You could make videos of 10,000s penguins colony in Antarctica, that would still not make them your audience.

[Megadot]

Thanks @flez for the detailed analysis, really appreciate the clarity.
It also highlights that with results like these those marketing campaigns are almost certainly running at a negative ROI.

[Megadot]

This ecosystem is seriously messed up. You have some curators doing honest work for $500 a month, and then others sitting on multiple bounties, creating a concentration of the same people managing everything. And on top of that, the Marketing Bounty is paying curators $15,000 a month for… honestly, who knows what they’re actually doing. It’s completely unbalanced and unsustainable.

[Megadot]

The real issue is that only a small portion of the budget is actually going into ads, and from that, you’re buying impressions in India and other low-value markets. That means we’re spending more than those users will ever bring back, resulting in a clear negative ROI. This needs to stop.

[ChrawnnaCorp]

The auditing cause is a very good one, but its important you don’t discredit yourself in the process.

The further you’ve railed on here, the more you’ve revealed how little you know about the topic you’re claiming to understand.

Kus reach building through ad buying was a suggestion of voters and was ratified in past votes as recently as last year.

Contrary to your assumption… India ad spend on X is $5/ day. Nigeria is $3. Both hotly growing crypto markets. Our partner, Addressable, is a crypto industry leader using on-chain intelligence to target accounts suspected of web3 activity.

This is peak noise making - likely making the serious auditing we need to do more difficult.

[salty_carbonara]

The previous comment was clearly asking about Youtube spending and not X spending.
Also total Youtube spending is way above 10k, your screenshots here account for a total of maybe 50$ so we are far from reaching any level of clarity and the question remains open.

Great to see you have access to the reporting dashboard, following the transparency KUS has promised, please do an export of the whole funding/advertising period on all the advertising channels - not only for sense of transparency but also to enable community to learn from your metrics (what works, what doesnt - with good reporting you could prevent someone else spending on the channel or location that does not respond).

Lastly - from the screenshot it is visible your ads on X were optimised for “impressions”. While this was a relevant tactic years ago, today most of the ads are “conversion” based with automatic optimisation towards the conversion. Is there are specific reason why the campaign was not optimised to conversion? Can MB curators also explain how is the funding distributed without clear instructions on the metrics implementation?

Thank you!

[salty_carbonara]

With the money spend on Kusamarian, while it is a working platform for inbound traffic and reports fresh news from the ecosystem, the main questions that should be raised by the community is:

• If OpenGov is fully funding all the operations (every single expense of your organisation is transferred to opengov directly or over MB) who owns the materials you produce?
• Who owns the leads you are capturing with ads? Are you sharing those leads with other relevant marketing teams, parity or W3F?
• If Kusamarian as a platfrom is fully funded by the OpenGov, shouldnt OpenGov be able to vote on your mandate on the platform? Or are you claiming full personal ownership due to the fact you started the platform?
• Often on AAG you would ask projects to proove the amount of Transactions they produced in Polkadot - have you ever considered establishing data metrics for Kusamarian, which would essentially monitor inbound traffic and whether this traffic actually produces transactions?
• What happens with Kusamarian content, all existing materials (funded by opengov) if you decide to hop on another chain?
• As a reporter who claims independance, what did you do regarding Marketing Bounty reporting and asking them also the heavy questions about spending?
• Do you think that as a reporter you are in potential conflict of interest since you are partially funded by Marketing Bounty, directly affecting your objectivity on researching Marketing Bounty spending?
• Do you think as a reporter and main host of AAG, it is not conflict of interest to also run your own DAO where you are personally engaging with DAO members on specific voting outcomes?
• Can you list Kusamarian internal guidelines on objectivity and fair reporting?
• And lastly, before Polkadot, what was your experience with reporting?