The Editorial and Publishing Arm (EPA) Season 6 Budget Proposal

Grants/Funding
1

The Editorial and Publishing Arm (EPA) Season 6 Budget Proposal

Authors: Trewkat, HiroKennelly, Frank America

Date: 2022-10-13T13:00:00Z

SUMMARY

In Season 6, the Editorial and Publishing Arm (EPA) will focus on expanding and evolving the Bankless Publishing brand through several initiatives designed to grow our audience and continue to attract quality writers, editors, and designers.

  • We’ve noticed and responded to the popularity of shorter / introductory-style articles, and will continue to ensure the majority of content provides a user-friendly onramp to DeFi technologies.
  • The Bankless Publishing website will evolve in Season 6 in tandem with the launch of our top-secret project early in the season.
  • The BanklessDAO Medium platform will continue to be a second home for Bankless Publishing content, ensuring the bDAO presence there remains a drawcard for new readers.
  • We are considering additional avenues for publication, including the DAO’s Mirror page and a separate Mirror page.
  • There will be a renewed focus on publishing educational content from bDAO newsletters.
  • The inaugural Bankless Publishing Awards will recognize the top web3 articles published by external authors in the previous year.

The total BANK requested for Season 6 operations is 1,268,000 BANK.

BACKGROUND

The Bankless Publishing audience is steadily growing. The number of Twitter account followers has reached 326 — smashing the Season 5 KPI (100% growth from a base of 74). In Season 5, the EPA project team continued to grow the Bankless Publishing brand through the publication of high-quality web3-related content on the website: https://banklesspublishing.com, tweeted articles, threads, and other content through the main BanklessDAO Twitter account.

In order to preserve readership and increase discovery, we continue to cross-post content on our BanklessDAO Medium (which has averaged 84 unique daily visitors over the last three months). In the second half of Season 5, we launched a newsletter — Bankless Publishing Recap — to ensure our articles reach the 17,000 existing newsletter subscribers. There’s also a top-secret project that will debut in early Season 6.

In short, the project team is fired up, and ready to keep shipping great content in Season 6 while expanding our reach.

MISSION & VALUES ALIGNMENT

Via the EPA workflow, Bankless Publishing ships articles designed to inform, investigate, educate, and entertain audiences wanting to learn more about going Bankless and other opportunities afforded by the technologies underpinning web3. This work is strongly aligned with the DAO’s mission to create user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies.

The EPA fosters the DAO’s values of education, integrity, decentralized governance, and crypto culture through a focus on constructive editing feedback, shared project leadership, open workflows, and consistent standards.

SPECIFICATION

In Season 6, the EPA will continue to grow its readership, cultivate talent, and work towards project self-sovereignty. The EPA will focus its energy on developing Bankless Publishing as the home for both introductory ‘101’ content and subject matter expertise. We will broaden our content menu for writers who are unsure about which topic to choose, while also providing a pathway to reach more experienced writers. We are expanding the number of roles available to contributors, further decentralizing the project to enable a greater number of members to help us further the Bankless Publishing mission.

SEASON 6 ROLES

Lead Staff Editor

  • Assess incoming article submissions in terms of required editing lift and writing style.
  • Manage the Kanban board and ensure accepted articles move through the editing process in a timely manner.
  • Post editing opportunities for qualified EPA Editors tag holders and ensure equitable assignment of editing tasks.
  • Act as central point of contact for submissions of the editing tests by prospective staff editors.
  • Take notes at the weekly EPA working session.

Content Managers (2)

  • Website management.
  • Attract and engage advertisers/sponsors.
  • Overall strategy / content placement.
  • Work with current authors to get articles ready for publication.
  • Cover design coordination (working with bDAO designers to get a custom cover).
  • Final edits and tweaks of the article for quality assurance (QA) and SEO, draft article tweet and social preview copy.
  • Shipping on Medium, banklesspublishing.com, and other channels.

Junior Content Manager

  • Maintain menu of article ideas.
  • Work with Content Managers to learn the ins and outs of BP.
  • Focus on getting newsletter articles ready for QA.
  • Keep track of payments for authors, editors, and designers.

Treasurer

  • Work with Junior Content Manager to ensure proper bounty input, and execute payments fortnightly.
  • Produce monthly operating reports.

Social Media Lead

  • Develop and maintain a Twitter strategy, plus other platforms such as LinkedIn.
  • Work with the Threadoooors to ensure high-quality, consistent threads of our articles and newsletter
  • Host Twitter Spaces with authors, editors, and members of the Bankless Publishing team.

PER ARTICLE BOUNTIES

Writers

  • Writers may submit an article for consideration at any stage during the season. If accepted for publication, the writer will work with the assigned content editor to finesse the piece for publication.
  • At the end of Season 6, the five articles with the most views recorded on the Bankless Publishing website will each earn the writer a 10,000 BANK bonus.

Content Editors

  • Having passed the Content Editing Test, work with the submitting author to improve thesis, structure, cohesion, topic coverage, and flow.
  • Ensure article text aligns with the current Editing Framework, while contributing to the continual improvement of this framework.

Copy Editors

  • Having passed the Copy Editing Test, proofread assigned articles and edit the copy, ensuring aspects such as linked references, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation are correct, and clarity of expression is excellent.
  • Ensure article text aligns with the current Editing Framework, while contributing to the continual improvement of this framework.

Cover Designers

  • In consultation with Content Managers, design and produce cover artwork and / or graphics for articles published by Bankless Publishing.

Threadoooors

  • Twitter threads of each new article and selected older articles, with accompanying custom graphics.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

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BRAND USAGE

Bankless Publishing leverages the BanklessDAO brand through retention of the Bankless concept and by maintaining a strong presence on the DAO’s social media channels. We aim to continue this strong trend and enhance ties with Bankless entities.

SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS

  • Launch secret project early in Season 6.
  • Grow Twitter to 500 followers.
  • Attract one sponsor for website.
  • Attract one sponsor for BP Recap newsletter.

NEXT STEPS

The next steps will be to continue with the business of creating and publishing quality content, growing out audience, and refining our vision for top-shelf web3 educational content.

SQUAD BACKGROUND

  • Trewkat
  • HiroKennelly
  • Frank America

Our three squad members have worked closely as a team during Season 5 to steward the EPA in a shared Coordinator role. Hiro and Frank are our OG Content Managers and Trewkat has been the Lead Staff Editor since the inception of the role.

We look forward to continuing to serve the BanklessDAO ethos for seasons to come.

  • I support this proposal
  • I do not support this proposal

0 voters

3 Likes
2

Hey EPA, great work as always!

I’m your Grants Committee Reviewer, a few questions:

  • What is the status with sponsorship? One of your KPIs in S5 was # of sponsorship ads placed, and you have a similar KPI this season (sponsors for newsletter and website). If you weren’t able to get an ad placed in S5, what makes you think you’ll get one in S6?
  • How many contributors do you have?
  • What kind of engagement are you getting on Twitter, emails, and the website? Do you have views/engagement metrics to share?
    • Have these improved over time?
2 Likes
3

Good day good ser! I’m sad to see you leaving the Grants Committee, but very, very excited to see what other positive changes you can make throughout the DAO!!

What is the status with sponsorship?

No sponsorships to date.

One of your KPIs in S5 was # of sponsorship ads placed, and you have a similar KPI this season (sponsors for newsletter and website). If you weren’t able to get an ad placed in S5, what makes you think you’ll get one in S6?

To be honest, I don’t know that we can get a sponsor in S6, but we will keep refining our offerings and our ask. We created the Bankless Publishing Recap in S5, a fortnightly newsletter that ships to BanklessDAO’s 18K Substack subscribers.

We have also engaged with folks in the Marketing Guild and DAOlationships to help us find a sponsor for our website and newsletter, and we are offering a 10% finder’s fee fas an incentive to do so.

We updated our pitch deck and website pricing in S5 too.

The bear has been tough on newsletter revenue - all of our newsletters have struggled to find consistent sponsorships since its onset. But we’ll keep working our contacts, staying in touch with those who are assisting us, and innovating in ways that begin to lessen Bankless Publishing’s reliance on sponsorship/ad placement for revenue.

How many contributors do you have?

Throughout Season 5, we will have had 30 contributors, but we’ve added a number of roles for Season 6 as we begin to decentralize the work, including a Deputy Content Manager and a Social Media Lead.

What kind of engagement are you getting on Twitter, emails, and the website? Do you have views/engagement metrics to share?

Substack is at 18K subscribers, 40%+ open rate. We had huge growth there in S5. I’ll drop Medium metrics below, which have been flat. I don’t have BP website metrics handy, but it’s about 150 reads per ship fwir. For Twitter metrics, I engaged Mag to produce metrics for all of our newsletter and EPA ships going back to S4. He did that, and WinVerse is putting it together. So we don’t have the hard data, but we will. For soft data, I’d say the average Like is about 40 and RT 20. Sometimes they double that, but that’s unusual.

To help us figure out how to make better use of Twitter, the Legal Guild’s Social Media lead is going to help us grow Bankless Publishing’s Twitter presence (we had 4x growth in S5) and come up with a strategy beyond threads and RTs/Likes, think Twitter Spaces etc. We also started threading articles once or twice per week in S5, and we’ll continue that in S6.

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Have these improved over time?

No, but it’s partly because we publish everything on two platforms: Medium and our website. And there will be more platforms to come. To answer your next question, lol, I don’t think if you add them up it will still show growth over time. Readership has dropped off since the bull, but that’s forced us to rethink how and what we ship. We’ve refocused on basic educational content, with a soft aim for that to make up ½ of our shipping. We’re going to get back to shipping newsletter content, in part, to increase ship frequency.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about sponsorship revenue, it’s that you get more if you ship more often :slight_smile: So we’re going to ramp up shipping in S6, diversity across platforms, and keep on experimenting.

3 Likes
4

I recall that you had some conversations with potential sponsors, were you able to get an idea of what they are looking for in potential ad platforms? I ask because it could potentially help you focus your efforts.

For instance: you said you’re going to be creating more platforms, but in general it’s easier to sell 10k audience on one platform than 10k audience split across 5 platforms. The needs of your potential sponsors can help you make decisions like this.

In general: if you don’t think you’ll find a sponsor, then what’s a smaller thing you can do to move in that direction? That should be your KPI. We are trying to set up a winnable game for you :slight_smile:

I wonder if you have thought about finding someone with partnership/sales skills who believes in BP and getting them working on this instead of hoping one of the other DAO teams comes through. If sales/sponsorships are your plan for self-sovereignty, then it makes sense to find a value-aligned contributor otherwise you’ll always be leaning on other DAO teams instead of taking your destiny in your own hands.

Why/how did you update website pricing? Don’t most people pay for banner ads on a CPM basis? I wonder if finding a single seasonal/monthly sponsor would be better than selling ad space individually.

Also your logo sucks, get a new one :wink: (this is a joke…kinda)

In general I am ok with this budget, but I’m worried that your budget increases are all going towards content, when it seems clear to me that content is not your weakness - it’s sales and marketing. I really hope you think about diversifying your team and efforts

1 Like
5

In many ways, I don’t think that optimizing for sponsorships is an ideal long-term solution. To recreate the web2 ad model in web3 is to fail to use the tools we are developing to try new methods of monetization. In many ways, I view sponsorships as a bridge between BANK and revenue generated through on-chain activities. More to come in S6. So I would view the small step analogy as one away from sponsorships and towards other revenue models. I’d like the KPI to be earn on-chain revenue in S6.

We would love to find someone who has an inclination for and expertise in marketing, sponsorships, sales etc. We almost had one, but she decided to focus on Podcast Hatchery. Rest assured, the eye is always out for the unicorn. Sales/sponsorships are not the ultimate goal - that’s on-chain revenue.

We dropped our website pricing dramatically in S5. Agreed re: seasonal/monthly, as that’s what we offer, both on the website and in the newsletter. There’s also new ad tech in the works that will debut soon :slight_smile:

2 Likes
6

Logo has now been replaced in the pitch deck :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes
7

Thanks for all the info, I appreciate you giving me a deep-dive!

Just to be clear I am a huge fan of this project! I think you have made some great strides in the last few seasons and am excited to see how you grow.

Keep killin it EPA! You are building bedrock in the bear that will bear fruit in the bull.

2 Likes
8

Thanks @links and I’m a huge fan of you! Will miss you on Grants but excited to see what other parts of the DAO you help to nourish and flourish!

1 Like