The “I can help you promoting your ICO” madness

The “I can help you promoting your ICO” madness

Hey There!
My name’s Someone, I run one of the biggest channels on YouTube (over 2M subscribers) Let’s-call-it-best-ICOs, and I have a cryptocurrency channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/…

As you know already, nothing is better than word of mouth, when it comes to advertising a brand. I can talk to my supporters about your ICO, and it’ll surely help out, as it has for several other companies I’ve worked with. In regards to payment, I don’t work on fixed pricing. But to give you a reference point, the last company I worked with gave me 5 BTC. If you’re interested, make me an offer, and I’ll see if it works.

Best,
Someone

Reference of video quality you can expect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…

We got this email (three times to be precise). If it was the first of the type in our box, we would ignore it. But it was just a one of many. Actually we laughed at the amount of BTC it suggests, considering way too much of the channel videos had too low number of views (like you can shoot a random rant about your bulb being too bright and you will get more). 5 BTC? $20 000 so some self-named authority can promote us to people that believe he has any authority to promote us? But if he only does promotional videos, how can anyone expect any objectivity? That’s our min target to make a game! Not even considering how much is this in targeted Facebook ads.

Well - people actually don’t know how much of the nowadays “objective” reviews they read or watch is just that - paid promotional material. After all, how many people would sit and read these long Whitepapers, when it’s easier to throw some cash wherever Someone tells them?

When we got to the example video of Someone promoting Paragon because “they have The Game” (the rapper that you couldn’t possibly not know about) and… whatever the female model name was (seems that only Americans know it anyway), and the Someone has read their Whitepaper and found out they are going to buy offices (sorry - it’s modern to use “real estate” as it attracts investors like nothing else) instead of renting them because, you know, real estate is expensive, we stopped laughing. It costs 5 BTC to have Someone to pretend that he read the Whitepaper?

Sure, and it’s actually a fair price, considering how much money people make from ICOs, and how much of the amount is meant for the marketing channels. Cryptum won’t be as successful as Paragon (not that you know how much they raised, but they’ve spent few hundred BTC to advertise it, so it’s everywhere). We are somewhere at the last 1/3rd of the current batch of ICOs.And we are the only ICO that doesn’t have at least 10% of its budget for marketing.

We just didn’t know we have to make an advertisement campaign that overblows any estimate by at least 100% and then adds 10% on top of that for marketing purposes.We always assumed these services relied on Google advertisement (or some other network ads) to make money. Instead, literally 90 out of 100 websites, channels and pseudo-independent authors actually push only paid content. 85 out of these don’t even have a registered company behind the website, and anyone that is actually assessing your ICO’s legality is actually avoiding taxes. And don’t even assume you got their origin, or the Italian promoting his website when his email header is saying “септембря” would seem a bit… weird.

We even got a website created a day after our sale start asking us to list our ICO only if we pay. Hell of a hurry for someone that has less visits than us! Please stop this! If you are someone, anyone, and you want to get paid for your work, please at least have the courtesy of doing some work before you get paid!

 

But you know what? Whatever we raise will be used to make products and more money. And we won’t pay 5 BTC to Someone as clueless as Greg. Or, from now on, anyone.

Promoting ICOs is turning out to be a bigger business than actually running an ICO.

 

*P.S. Yes, the “Rpomote” is something we kept from another email. At least someone noticed!