Hi Zcash fam,
We created two reports as part of the final milestone for our Zcash Media Launch Plan grant:
Here, we’d also like to provide an interpretation of these analytics reports, outlining our accomplishments, what worked, what didn’t work so well and what we’d like to improve upon in the future. (A note: The date range for this data is March 31 - May 7, 2022.)
We’re incredibly humbled by the continued support from the Zcash community and it’s been such a pleasure working with and getting feedback from the community. We’re proud of the work we’ve done and hope to continue educating the world about the importance of privacy and the enormous promise provided by Zcash. Thanks again for affording us with this opportunity.
What worked…
YOUTUBE
In just over a month, we’ve managed to amass over 2,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel, garnering almost 250k views and 6.7k hours of watch time across three videos—after starting from zero. In comparison to other educational and crypto YouTube channels with less than 100k followers (who’ve been around significantly longer), our view counts are exceptionally high and interest in our content is clear: our click-thru-rate (the percentage that our thumbnails are clicked on when they show up on YouTube) is 8.6%, well above the industry average of 2.1%. Anecdotally, from our Digital Marketing Strategist’s experience launching and working with YouTube channels, this growth has been rapid and exceptional, due in large part to the support from the community. When looking at whether or not one’s channel is reaching its intended audience on YouTube, a good metric to look at is average view duration, or how long, on average, a viewer spends watching your video; our channel’s average view duration is 1:36 (see analytics reports and explanation below in “what didn’t work” section) and the Snowden reveal video has an impressive average view duration of 3:34.
Additionally, sentiment is very positive on the videos - 95.9% of the likes were positive. The channel has also had truly global reach, with high view count numbers in India, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, France, and others—largely in countries where crypto adoption is high. The global reach was likely facilitated by our creation of subtitles for the top 11 languages of crypto adoption. Through our launch process, we learned our highest viewership is in America. This makes sense since America is one of the largest crypto-interested countries, many of our interviewees had American perspectives, and America also has some of the highest privacy concerns compared to other cultures. In addition to other targets, we will continue to develop material that speaks to American interests since they are one of our main audiences.
Our success can be attributed largely to the immense push by community members, propelled via a pre-launch campaign on social media where we posted daily clips from our first videos, directing our audiences to subscribe to our channel in every post, and by leaning on the incredible people who appear in our videos and their networks. We’re thrilled to have achieved these numbers and intend to continue to grow our channel.
SOCIAL MEDIA
As anticipated, Twitter has become our primary two-way social media platform, a space where a large population of crypto lovers exist and interact. With 2.2k followers, Twitter post impressions totaled over 1M with over 45k engagements—high numbers that we are excited to have reached after starting with a small initial following. Additionally, our posts on Telegram garnered over 1M+ impressions, bolstered by a Gleam giveaway and over 100 promotional posts across important crypto Telegram groups. Small but mighty, our Instagram also has the highest engagement rate (the percentage of users who engaged with a post that was served to them) of all our social channels at 5.2%. Facebook played a role mostly so that we could use its powerful Ads platform, but we intend to examine further growth there.
PAID MEDIA
With a spend of just over $3,000, our paid media strategy helped give us the kick start we needed while increasing awareness of the Zcash Media brand. To start, we boosted our trailer through the Facebook Ads platform (which offers good targeting and reach) with a general audience target of people interested in “digital currency,” reaching 321k users and garnering over 8k link clicks and a low cost-per-click of $0.06. We also used our trailer, and first two videos as ad creative on the Google Ads platform, having an average cost-per-view of just $0.02, almost 2M impressions, and 160K views on our videos.
MARKETING, PR & INFLUENCER OUTREACH
- Budget: We had originally planned to spend $10k on 3rd party campaigns with Coindesk and/or other widely visited crypto media outlets. However, through Naomi Brockwell’s collaboration with Coindesk, this ended up materializing at no cost to us. We were then able to shift $5k to cover the press release package with PR Newswire and shift the remaining funds to additional production costs. We also spent significantly less with these efforts than we would have spent with Coinbound (an agency we met with prior to our launch), whose proposed PR package totalled $18k, in comparison to our approximately $13k spend.
- Release performance: Both the 4/25 and 4/27 press releases are measuring well above industry average benchmarks, with the Snowden press release having a benchmark metric of 100 (based on the Total Visibility Index score out of 100). Average pickup on PR Newswire press releases within a 48-hour timeframe is 235 and both of our press releases doubled that. In addition, the Snowden press release had a score of 100/100 for Engagement (click-thru’s & shares).
What didn’t work…
YOUTUBE
- Our average view duration is below where we’d like it to be, being pulled down by both a Google Ads Discovery experiment, as well as growing pains in establishing what thumbnails and titles work best for our channel—an element of YouTube channel creation that takes time and data to properly tackle and which we’ll continue to address. Optimization of future paid media experiments, thumbnails, and titles to improve average view duration will be a priority going forward.
- Viewership drops off within the first couple minutes of Future Money: What is Zcash video. Factors for why include: the video has a slow pace, or doesn’t immediately hit users in a flashy way. This was a deliberate choice since the video was meant to walk viewers through the logic of why cryptocurrencies were invented, leading them to Zcash. In order to overcome this problem, we will supplement full-length videos with short cut downs that can be widely shared across social platforms, or as stand-alone short clips on YouTube, allowing viewers with shorter attention spans to be able to see all of our content. However, we did notice that when a viewer watched longer than the first few minutes, they tended to watch the video all the way through. This highlights a potentially “quality over quantity” aspect where motivated viewers who watch the entire video are now armed with a huge amount of knowledge about the Zcash story, which they can share with their networks.
- Our YouTube effort was not as effective in India where we had a low average view duration, despite high view counts. According to an India-based team member, this could be due to the fact that the Indian government has made certain aspects of the crypto industry very difficult (30% capital gains tax, restrictions on crypto startups) that has led to a depression of interest in crypto. Therefore, we will focus on other countries, such as Turkey, where we were connected with their largest crypto Telegram group.
- Monero shills did manage to infiltrate the comments section of all of our videos
SOCIAL MEDIA
- Due to bandwidth limitations, our community management on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube wasn’t as fast or as thorough as we wanted it to be (many thousands of engagements not able to be responded to).
- Our Telegram posts had less discussion than we had hoped, perhaps due to poor market conditions (many of the Telegram groups we targeted are focused on short-term news that can affect the market). We will continue to use the Telegram groups we used that had the best engagement and also search for groups interested in crypto education instead of solely market news.
- Although it’s steadily growing, our Instagram followership remains quite low (at just 142 followers), though no ad spend has been made there yet.
- Similarly, Facebook needs some love to increase its follower count
- Due to bandwidth constraints, other platforms were not used, although we see numerous expansion opportunities on other platforms like LinkedIn where we saw people sharing Zcash Media videos
PAID MEDIA
- One Video Discoverability campaign experiment, while providing lots of views to our video, was poorly optimized, contributing to a low average view count on our Future Money video
- As is customary with any start-up effort, we underspent on our ads budget, this is due in part to leaving enough buffer to cover other costs that come up, and difficulty in getting our ads approved due to crypto-specific policies by different ad platforms
MARKETING, PR & INFLUENCER OUTREACH
- Engaging with journalists to write their own stories and create their own videos has risks of its own. Because embargoes are not legally binding, they can be broken with little avenue for recourse. This was the case when Forbes broke our embargo, which meant that all negotiated outlets (like Naomi Brockwell/Coindesk) also posted their articles subsequently before our video went live, to compete with Forbes.
- In the future, Zcash Media will make sure they have all videos finished before engaging with journalists in order to avoid getting scooped and having to rush to put out our videos. However, the Dobbertin scenario was unique due to the rapid pace, timeline, and number of moving parts that had to be maintained.
Next steps/improvements for the future…
We’ve learned a lot about resourcing, bandwidth, and workflow in this initial push. As a result, we’ll be both scaling and expanding our team to make sure we’re equipped to tackle creating and distributing cinema-quality videos on a longer timeline. For example, specific scaling efforts that we will be putting into action as a result of what we have learned so far include hiring a) community manager, b) social media content producer, c) social media content editor. Additional scaling efforts will be outlined in our forthcoming grant proposal for continuation of Zcash Media over the long term.
To make sure we continue to improve our key metrics (e.g., click-thru rates, video watch duration) and sustain our growth, we’ll be employing multi-variant testing and data analysis on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. We’ll also look to expand our audience with tactics including continued grassroots outreach, more succinct retargeting with paid media, social listening, events, and email marketing.
Sincerely,
Jess (On behalf of Zcash Media)