[Short #155] Live Social Audio x POAPs

PLUS: 🤔 is it Web3 or web3

A couple weeks ago I started noticing a particular Twitter Space rise in prominence: Ryan Carson’s Daily Dose 💊. The show is every morning at 7:30AM PT, and brings in thousands of listeners, including myself some days.

This morning’s show brought in almost 5,000 listeners, with peak concurrent listeners at 2,000+.

This isn’t a one-trick pony either. The Twitter Spaces is bringing in numbers. Consistently.

Even a spontaneous Twitter Spaces Ryan is hosting at the time of this writing has 857 concurrent listeners 🤯

Why the hell has this Twitter Spaces grown so much and so quickly?

TLDR on Ryan Carson:

• Founder and CEO of Treehouse before entering the web3. I remember using Treehouse to attempt learning HTML years ago. Treehouse was great, I was not.

• Joined PROOF (parent company of Moonbirds) as COO

• Left PROOF to start a NFT fund, 121G

So where does Daily Dose fall into all this? Daily Dose is effectively the media arm of 121G, allowing for a:

• larger footprint for 121G, Ryan, and his team

• indirect ad channel for the fund

• platform to bring on friends and prospective or current portfolio companies

Daily Dose isn’t just a cog in 121G’s strategy, it’s a pillar.

But that doesn’t explain the rapid growth of the Spaces. What’s going on here?

POAPs.

POAP = Proof Of Attendance Protocol. The web2 equivalent of this would be a ticket stub. If you have a stub, it means you (probably) attended a specific event. Same is true with POAPs.

If you have a POAP, it means you attended an event (can be physical or online), met someone, or participated in something. As a consumer, you can mint POAPs for free because they are minted on Gnosis (Ethereum sidechain that is much cheaper and more efficient).

Here’s a sample of my POAP collection, with several of them being Daily Dose POAPs.

There are also multiple ways to mint a POAP: NFC, a secret word, QR code, or numerical code.

Because these POAPs are also NFTs, they can be more dynamic than a traditional ticket stub (which is also why the ticketing industry itself is working to apply blockchain tech).

So thousands of people are joining these spaces for NFT badges?!

That’s what I thought initially, but it didn’t make sense. There has to be more to this…I asked one of the alpha groups I’m in what the deal was.

If the project is really launching in Q3, Ryan will have wayyy more than 5,000 people joining these Daily Dose Spaces.

The POAP strategy itself isn’t new, but implementing POAPs as a means to obtain a perk (in this case qualifying for a mint) is the first time I’ve heard of this.

So what are the takeaways?

• POAPs are a great way to encourage engagement as a low-cost incentive for attendance, similar to how in-app badges have done the same for user engagement (eg: Duolingo)

• Explicitly communicating POAP utility supercharges engagement

• Ryan Carson’s POAP qualification of ‘the top X POAP collectors will qualify for mint’ ensures consistent and growing engagement

• The minting window for these POAPs last a few minutes and the secret phrase is given out piecemeal, combatting engagement dropoff for a majority of the Space

This strategy isn’t perfect though. The quality of the spaces still matters, the Q3 date means at least 6 more months of these Spaces, and who knows where web3 will be at that point. Also, the diehard listeners and POAP collectors today may get exhausted after a period of time and give up.

Regardless, this is an interesting strategy to consider for community building:

• Providing another avenue for proving engagement and loyalty

• Another avenue to surprise and delight

• Utilizing POAPs (or >X number of POAPs) as a qualification for an event, perk, airdrop, or special recognition

• Collaboration with community’s creatives to co-design POAP art

• Additional way to broaden audience base

• More followers for the hosts and speakers

• Can live on any social platform, not just Twitter. Twitch, Clubhouse, Discord, etc.

On top of that, POAPs are easy to create. Fill in a few fields, no technical experience needed, and voila!

I may forget about the Daily Dose by the Q3 date, or maybe these Spaces will continue to be impossible to ignore. We’ll see 🤷🏻‍♂️

Web3 vs. web3

Yesterday I had a random question. I’ve typed the term Web3 so much, but have seen others type web3. Which is it?!

TPan 🦇🔊 @TPan_Web3

Is it Web3 or web3? Why?

Those that are more experienced in the art of written language shared their thoughts. As a friendly reminder, I literally started writing in April this year (aka: I’m a dumb dumb).

Tom 🪡 @tomismeta

@TPan_Web3 web3 Capitalization denotes importance of one of the letters over another. Decentralization (and improved equality) of power is a primary principle of web3. Each of the letters being lowercase is a visual, language-based reinforcement of decentralization.

adam @adam__xyz

@TPan_Web3 All the major style guides revised "Internet" to "internet" in 2016, when that word became part of the accepted lexicon. To lower-case something is to implicitly acknowledge its universality.

Musharraf.eth/lens @musharrafff

@mrig__ @TPan_Web3 or is it Web3.0, web3.0 Web 3, web 3, Web 3.0, or web 3.0? rn, it is what people write it as. I prefer Web3 over web3. But I think I'll eventually switch to web3, the same way we write crypto not Crypto, or blockchain not Blockchain.

Macauley @MacNoEth

@TPan_Web3 Depends on if you view it as a proper noun or not, which is debatable because web3 isn't a definitive "thing" yet. I prefer lowercase, it looks nicer.

Joeri Billast | joeri.nft ♈️ CMOstories.eth @joeribillast

@TPan_Web3 My book editor told me to write Web3 with a capital W because that tends to be the standard that he sees in most communications...

The jury is leaning towards web3 with some good point. So if you see me start typing web3 without the capitalization, you know why 🙂

See you tomorrow!