Corrupting Content

“To make it in crypto you have to keep adding value.”

A few people have told me things of this nature along my way, and especially in my early days. Providing value stems from talent, at least to some degree. My talent is clearly the ability to articulate complex systems in simple terms. I’m a professional “dumbdowner”. So a Youtube channel seems to be a fit.

When I first started my channel, I certainly hoped that it would allow me to quit my day job and achieve a degree of financial freedom. TBH I should probably accept that this has been achieved, as I’m full time crypto now.

That being said, this freedom did not come from sources that I expected. My Adsense revenue from my channel averages about 150USD a month. I only have approximately, at the time of writing, 12K subscribers, and most of my videos achieve only about 2K views. Hardly enough to produce enough ad views to sustain a family. Instead, my success has come from the community in the form of grants, donations, and allocations. I won’t list them all here, but to those people, projects, and organizations that have been so generous I thank you for this.

A second reason for producing content is for my own education. I have always believed in value investing and understanding a project, in my mind, is tantamount to one’s success. As a consequence of producing content, research is needed, and a deep understanding allows one to produce better content. This in turn allows me to make a better choice as to whether I want to put my funds with a specific project.

I have always tried to maintain a fully honest narrative in my videos with a simple “this is what they do…you decide if you like it or not.” I, for the most part, try to avoid price action, tokenomics, and investment metrics. If something has issues, I try to voice them, but I’m a nice guy and to bash something that I can’t build myself is not in my nature.

As my audience grows, so does my influence. I hope that people don’t ape projects that I cover, simply because I cover them and I think that for the most part this is not what is happening. With a higher level of influence, I receive more and more requests to cover projects.

Requests usually come in the form of something of this nature.

“Hello Ceazor. Long time fan of your channel. Reaching out to see if we can collaborate on a video”.

These DMs usually come from either projects or supportors (AKA investors) of said projects. To their requests I usually respond with,

“Send me your docs, I will read them and if I like it, I’ll make a video. Then if you like my video you can donate something to me.”

More often than not this is met with surprise and even an ask as to how much is a suitable “donation”.

This format has a few pros and cons. Let’s start with the pros:

• I don’t have to spend time negotiating a fair price, which requires a valuation assessment of my content.

More time = more research and more family

• I don’t have to spend time chasing people for funds promised.
• I don’t feel obligated to filter my opinion, or even produce the content at all.
• It maintains my ethos of producing for the purpose of educating myself.

This method is not without issues though:

• There is a lot of money floating around and simply asking for it more often than not will get you some.
• Who’s going to say “No” to free advertising, and a lot of projects that do approach me, never do return with a donation. However, projects are quite busy, so I don’t mean to bulk them all up here in a single bundle.
• There are a lot of content creators that charge a ludicrous amount for a single piece of “fill and shill” content. Isn’t my content worth at least a fraction of theirs?

These points in consideration, I decided to found a content creation DAO, CRE8RDAO with the purpose of passing the role to other people of chasing down funds and getting them locked in. And to have a place where content creators can go, find projects looking for content, produce this content and get paid without all the issues.

This too has had some shortfalls. I have found myself obligated to produce content that perhaps I might pass over as it is simply not interesting or innovative enough. I have also been told things of this nature.

“When you said….in your video. This is not really great marketing.”

This obviously influences my opinion, which could be wrong, but is based on my understanding from going through the process of research that I follow.

There are quite a few people that are “in it for the tech” but I suspect that the vast majority of them have full financial security or a long life ahead of them with little current familial obligations. So, the rest of us have to balance our moral code of being honest, but getting our gets.

Now the purpose of this blog is unknown to me. There isn’t any actionable task at the end. No links to follow. No tokens to buy. It’s simply a post I was inspired to write for the purpose of airing things out.

I hope it has provided some value to some.