Bitcoin Forum

I've noticed many ICOs have to spend a lot of money on promotions and advertising.

For example, let's say an ICO raises 10 million dollars but has to spend 9 million on promotion.

Therefore, they only really raised 1 million for the project.

Isn't this unethical?

If you're starting a company and looking for investors the traditional way via stock equity, you would never spend 9 million or even 5 million or even 2 million in order to raise 10 million from investors.

This begs the question, what ratio of promotion cost versus funds raised for ICOs is ethical?

And how do we know if an ICO is using an ethical ratio?

In the first place, where would you gather an information concerning how much would the ICO spent on promotions? Because thinking about the matter, Projects aren't even responsible to fund the bounty hunters, in addition marketing transaction I guess would not going to price that high just to say, they've putted the right amount in marketing.

Very good question. I also do not know exactly why new projects spend so much money on advertisements. In cryprocurrency, advertisement is worth it? It there any set criteria that binds a project to collect only a certain amount of money? or one can collect as much as it can? But I think cryptocurrrency is such platform where advertisements rule and without advertisements, you can not get the attention of traders and investors. That is why I think it is a bit different from stock market. It is decentralized and it is for all people around the world.

I don't think is the case, they spend only  3 to 7 % of the coin supply I have never seen an ICO that spend half of their supply just to market their token, I have been part of bounty campaign and they only spend 7% the most, can you name that bounty campaign that spend over 50% of their supply.

For me that is not a problem, every ICO project must have its own way. They are free to promote their projects. Of course, nothing should be violated, as long as it is in accordance with the rules and ethical codes that apply, promotion of the ICO project is a legitimate thing.

The development of the ICO project this year has indeed declined because most projects have made changes towards the IEO.
But still there are still good opportunities and it depends on who we choose.

I wouldn't say it unethical instead ill say it ineffective, There is nothing wrong about the project funds allocation within their budgets, but it's kind of ironic if the project prioritizes promotion funds instead of research and developments. Personally, I'll stay away from that kind of project whereas their prioritize a promotion or advertising instead of focusing on the budget of the development.

it's about promotion in generally, and the bounty campaign is only part of that.
However, I havnt seen project that would spend so much money on promoting and herewith didn't try to hide this fact.
Usually scam projects spend most of the budget on promotion.

it is nowhere near that numbers. you see the main purpose of an ICO is to raise funds no spend them! in other words it is a scam where lazy people copy some code and get paid for it. such people don't want to spend that much money. that is the main reason why they keep advertising using fools through "bounty hunting" and things like that. because they can pay them an extremely small amount of money which is not even real "money" it is their token which these fools have to sell to get money so as a result it doesn't even cost them anything to advertise their ICO since they are paying in a token that they created out of thin air with no cost.

Because business needs massive promotion whatever it takes, this is the first rule of putting up a business. ICO is an international business so, you need to cater the entire audience by means of massive promotion, and whether the business would succeed or not, its up to them to decide.

It's not unethical if you believe that the ICO you are advertising is legit and will create an opportunity for the potential investors.
There is a freedom in ICO as anyone with an idea can start its ICO, but we supporters or promoters needs to ensure that we conduct a simple
investigation on the team to determine their capability to run the project.

This is only not for the advertisers, but also for the investors, it's necessary that they study as well as investing is always risky.

Actually it's not that much to advertising for ICO. You can just hire bounty managers and let them control the bounty and the advertising. I don't know beside the bounty, like google ads or social media ads, it will takes more cost. It's worth actually to advertise ICO for the ICO owner.

Only inexperienced teams will make that, from where you define the figures it will not happen to any serious projects to spend lots of money just to cater their promotions since most of them will only use 5-10% of actual revenue or maybe less than that, serious developers will focus to development and how they can manage to move forward using the funds that they gathered for securing the progress of their projects.

However, I don't think that ICO will be spending that much money in their promotions though. Where did you get that number? But for the sake of argument if ICO just raises $1 million then I wouldn't say it's unethical.

It is still within their boundaries, and it's really up to them how to manage the remaining balance o $1 million. If they truly believed that their project is a game changer then they will continue to developed it and squeeze everything and try to make the project successful in the future.

I think that spending huge amounts of money on project promotion is stupid since the project collects funds primarily for the development of the project and not for advertising, so advertising should be in moderation.

I think that's too much and I hope that you gathered that information from a reliable source. I don't think that a certain ICO would spend too much on promotion and advertisement. We all know that every ICO needs to get advertised and I think some team spend that amount because they are managing a big project.

There is no need to spend so much money on advertising as long as we can market it in a simple way, investors will be interested if the marketing is good and there is no need to fancy to hire anything.

There is always a fund or budget component for this. Typical project wouldn't spend much on an advertisement knowing they can't get an audience in order for them to success. If I will create a project, I will hire someone for bounty with an effective marketing. Not just a typical one, and giving a fair budget. Also, used some ads like CMC those with high traffic. Investors likely  to check whats on the ads. Dont spend too much, focus more on development.

I don't think it is unethical at all (unless it is a scam and you have knowledge about it)

You are not pointing gun to anybodys head to buy, you are just telling. At the end, everyone should make his inspection and act on it, not just take anybodys word.

Projects do not specify soft cap unnecessarily. If devs are spending extra money on marketing, this is thier own choice.
If you are talking about bounty, 90% of the bounty already get less than the expected money.

His numbers are funny to begin with. Who in the right mind will spend about 90% of their ICO generated funds to promotions and advertising (though it is just an example)? Most of them are after for the money, they will never spend that much in these campaigns. Most projects are paying their tokens because they don't have to spend anything, only the gas fee if it's eth token. As far as I know, there is no rule in terms of how much you want to spend with your promotions. It depends on your project plans.

No one spends so much money on advertising. There is no point in such costs. Usually spending on advertising is not more than 15-30% of the total budget for the development of the project. It all depends on the marketing strategy.

well, where did you get information like that?
I think there is management to overcome the budget for advertising and how much sales to get. so I think what you say is not true at all

Like all kind of marketing it is not unethical at all but if people now it is marketing.

If you advertise it without knowledge of reciever, that would become unethical.

Advertising of the ICO is not unethical because there is no people will harm with this. But, fake ICO should be monitorised. Google also allow advertising on it's platform which is the very big and influence all over the world. So, it is not unethical.

Advertising is necessary in any case but some sectors require more attention than others. New Social Media Administrators can confirm this idea as well and hiring professional managers can boost your project's view and service quality.

Your judgments are entirely wrong ICOs projects often use the Tokens they create to pay for promotional expenses through bounty.
Also, they can pay a small fee to place ADS on popular websites like Bitcointalk, CMC.

So many fake advertise sites can make another example of misconception and this is not rocket science to control it. I think having a strong plan can change the rules of a game and reliable projects will gladly take advantage of it.

Can you point us to a project where you have seen they have spent 90% of the fund raised from investors used for promotion?

If it is true then the project is doing a wrong thing, perhaps a scam imo.

Any ICO that tells you this is a very fishy one because it is not realistic and does not make any sense at all to quote such amount of money for promotion as against what they will use to develop the project, if they are using almost 80% of money raised for promotion, which they will still use part of the remaining one to register on an exchange, then what is left of them to develop the project, are they developing a mini poultry farm or what.

Secondly what promotional means will gulp such amount, how much are they even paying bounty hunters who do the main job, bounty hunters are the major tools these people use in promoting their project which highest they separate is 5 to 10%, so mate, check you fact very well again.

an ico with such plans or requirements is already suspicious. no project has to spend
90% of its income directly on advertising. i haven't seen such a plan myself yet but if so it's certainly not recommendable :D

That is why there are bounties and airdrops to promote those ICOs. Your example has a bad marketing. Also who would spend a money that is 9 million dollars for an ICO of 10 million dollars? Maybe a 9 million dollar for a 50 million dollar ICO would be a good trade.

And if you want to include bounties as a promotion or other kind of advertisements, there is an allocation in percentage of the collected money from ICO that would still depends on the sales. The payment are on tokens so it is not really sure on the promised amount in a form of tokens. There are many factors on this and most of it is on the exchange listing and most of the promised amount payed in bounty are not exact.

So the answer if it is ethical, NO! It is not. ICO has risk and it is your choice if you want to join or not. Only few get the luck of becoming a success, so better choose the right one.

wait if you see they don't really spend money on promotions. first, bounty campaign they pay using their tokens. so this does not include costs. promotion with advertisements, maybe this requires a fee but I make sure it won't reach 1M or even more. numbers that are too big are only for promotion, what's more now Google and Facebook have banned crypto ads. so actually they only spend a small fee for promotion.

This is an interesting question. I'd say it's ethical to advertise as long as it is a small percentage of the overall budget and made transparent to investors beforehand. Also, it's fine as long as the project abides by applicable laws regarding running an ICO.

I think most of the ico's pay from their wallet, if they are gonna advertise from the start where will the money will come from, also they can do bounty campaign so they don't need to spend real $$$ to advertise their project.

No, they have raised $10m but they have an expense of $9M. But you may not know if that amount is already part of their budget.

The promotion might be high and costly but if their project succeeds and is being looked at the long term. They can generate more revenue and that average expense for the promotion will be recovered.

I think it is time for ICOs to spend the money they looted, on advertisement to attract more users. Trust me this does not happen any more. IEO is an alternative and when people have alternatives, they just do not pay attention to investing in projects which are dubious. ICOs have lost their prestige and advertising it now will not help the least. IEO will never advertise because it has already gotten the fame and costumer base.

I would not say it's unethical but i will say it's a misplacement of priority.  Ico should spend a large chunk of money developing thier platform and have a working product.  This will help cut cost of advertising and give their ico an edge over others

With work products, a project can raise a lot of money. And cover all your financial costs. But most of the projects need investors' money. And when their project crumbles, the complete problem begins.

How do you say so? It is usual to advertise an ICO since the developers need investors for their project. It will not be funded without the help of investors and investors are gained by promoting or conducting an ICO. It is not unethical, but it is usual to the people to make advertisment that will help their project to boost up.

Yes, it is unethical because you are promoting a coin or token that can be a potential scam to get some reward from promoting or advertising it. We all the money but I guess we should find a different way to gain it and not buy promoting ICOs.

Who let the bounty manager or team open a new thread for promoting the scam project. These projects are like mystery box and everyone wants to test it like bounty hunters. Promotng the project doesn't mean you are engaged with it somehow.

if icos spend 90% of their money on advertisements then that project is going to fail no matter what, we should distant ourselves from such project. a good ico does not have to spend huge money on advertisements, they can very much succeed with community support.

Advertising is very important factor in every project. Without advertising, you will not gain anything especially the investors that will help your project to grow bigger and bigger.

What will happen to your project if you will not earn or no one is willing to help and support your project? In short your project is dead if you will not going  to advertise it. Therefore advertising is very important in every project, don't say that it is unethical. You just don't know how important it is.

But too much is unethical. That is the best conclusion.

I don't think that would be happening. Every startup has a planner who plans things and gets them executed. Similarly every ICO must be having a strategy prepared to be executed at the given time.
Every ICO has different goals and the amount to be raised is also different for every ICO. I am sure every ICO allocates a percentage of amount raised and distributes it towards the expenses of developing the project which includes promotion. Lets say if an ICO raise $10M then 50% should go for marketing and promotion, 20% for payments of team, 10% reserved funds, 20% for further developments etc... Just an example though.
It just won't make sense if an ICO is raising $10M and spending 90% of it promoting it.

I think both are very important. where with community support it is related to the success of the ICO, but in the development of maximized advertising projects can also help in developing other communities. it is useful to build greater market demand, so the market can be stronger.

How can you precisely say that they have been using such an high amount for promotion and advertisement. I don't think that is the case.
Only if the project is scam then they initially tend to spend a lot or they spend just a fraction.

First, you ned solid evidence with the numbers you are provuding. You cannot just pick random numbers from thin air and blurt out they are overspending on ads. That's unethical.

Second, every project or ico have their rights to spend money for ads and information dessimination. How else whould they let others know their existence. I believe every Ico have alloted budget for ads. It is only unethical if they exceed their alloted budget without informing the investors first.

Advertising the ICO can be unethical if there is any involved scam in the project. ICOs usually are created by porfessional teams who seek the success of the project. There is no exception here, fortunately.

This is the reason why they are doing a bounty campaign. To reduce their expenses in advertising because they are not spending that much money to the bounty campaign. They are spending tokens to advertise their project.

One thing more, please provide a good information of what you posting. I didn't hear any ICO that spent 9m on advertising :D.

ANd thats why ICO need financial advisor so they won't spend too much money just for the marketing promotion.
Anyway, promotion and advertisement is not unethical, as long the budget is not too high.
It is a part of the marketing strategy for the ICO.

unfortunately now I don't believe in ico too much. even now some ico projects are also diminishing in demand. where the market is no longer supportive of ICO, because investors don't believe in ico which is not really convincing.

Every project sets soft cap and hard cap. I think setting soft and hard caps means the limitation of rising funds. Soft cap means for a project to continue it if it reaches soft cap, and hard cap means a limitation of maximum fund-raising. It means if a project reaches its hard cap, it cannot raise more funds. I agree that there is not strict regulations regarding ICO and STO. Regulations are needed.

How can you raised enough funds if you are not advertising your ICO ?
Peoples cannot know about your coin if you don't have any promotion planning in the public.
And the good ICO should have fund first, to advertise their ICO and give explanation about their project.

I think advertising an ICO is not unethical, rather, what is unethical is that some ICO's have deceiving promotional gimmicks like having a huge amount of bounty pool designed to attract bounty hunters but in the end turned out rip them off by not fulfilling conditions on their own bounty campaigns. This I think is very unacceptable and will have a negative impact on the project itself.

Can you give us the name of ICO that spend a huge amount of their own money in advertising, the fact is they are using their own token which is the money they produce to pay people to market their ICO, which is known as bounty campaign, they never spend a single cent here only their effort to create their own token, roadmap website and promotional materials, but they pay zero to their advertisers.

I don't know about ethics but it doesn't even make business sense for the investors. You are buying value, but if you are putting in a dollar and immediately only get back 10 cents, then you need the token to be valued at x10 from the start of listing just to break even. Sounds absolutely ridiculous to me.

If you're an ICO though, they don't care. 90%? 95% IF the end game is profit for you, everything goes.

Legit ICOs are businessmen not kids. Why would they spend 9M for advertising if they only had 10M in their hands. Advertising expense are only costs 20-30% of the fund. They should only do that if and only if they had 95-100% of return of investment. Common sense is the key.

Some ICO's have such similar figures with regards to promotion, but I think they would not spend a sizable amount on such activities when they have only gathered almost the same as that amount, rather, I think it was already allocated through tokens value, and not the actual fund generated thru the ICO which is somewhat absurd in financial sense. If I'm not mistaken, most of that data can be found on project's tokenomics.

Nope, your example is completely wrong, if an ICO would likely to make a project then there is a BUDGET for this and I don't think that any ICO would spend 9 million dollars just for advertising and leave a million dollars completely for the project, it doesn't make sense and a good ICO will likely to establish a BUDGET PLAN completely for the expenses that will be used for advertising, bounties, and for the project itself, so I don't think it is considered unethical but we cannot let go of the fact that some ICOs are likely to be this bad and will probably do this if there is no one to take care of the budget.

Promotional or advertising budgets in every ICO are already allocated. Because a good project is certainly not possible to do excessive promotion to spend the project funds, that is not possible. Because now it's very difficult to get funds from investors. Of course the project also will not arbitrarily issue funds only for excessive advertising promotion or unethical.

That is because, they are thinking for a long term investment back from their project. The best way to do that is to strengthen their marketing, and even the profit is not really obtained on the ICO stage, once their project has been launched, there, the profit will going to be steady. They will need just to be successful in funding their project initially.

I hope you could provide us with proofs to support your claim and could provide us with much clearer insight on that matter. As what I've mentioned earlier, BUDGET is already allocated even before the start of the ICO because most projects set aside a certain portion of their total token allocation for marketing purposes but that BUDGET don't come from the proceeds of the ICO, rather, it was a token allocation and not ETH or BTC of fiat proceeds, I hope you know what I mean. :)

How did you get to know that they spend that much to promote their ICO? I don't really think so, and there's no site or place where they show how much ICOs have spent, though I do know they spend a lot of money, but most of them do recover more than that and even have more money. And that's one of the reasons ICO is not meant for everyone, if you don't have a good idea and you can't afford what it will cost, then its better to stay off. And not what these guys do these and stuffing the crypto community with lots of useless ICOs, like seriously.

Advert is a necessary requirement for the success of an ICO, there is no possibility in your submission, except for scam project, no reasonable developer will use 90% of  fund raise for advert, it is ethical to advertise for investors awarness and adoption.

According to my understanding, in business to achieve the set objectives, we cannot ignore marketing and advertising strategies. Therefore, ICOS advertising projects and spending a lot of money are understandable. Because it will be an attraction from known investors. You cannot develop your own projects without advertising.

The ICO advertising problems are not only problems of teams and there is a great chance to upgrade the old version of the advertisement. It is not unethical to advertise the ICO anyway.

For bounties ICOs spend only 1-2 % of their total supply and for future marketing activities around 5-10%. Marketing activities has their limits and it would not be justifiable to spend 50 % of the funds for marketing.

That is more ideal proportion and not the one that is posted in OP which way too absurd. No team in their right mind would spend big budgets like 90 percent for marketing alone which is taken from ICO proceeds.

Well, some projects can use their marketing budget for spreading awareness about the project on online public platforms. The amount totally depends on the token sale allocation and the interest to the project.

I think what is ethical is for ICO or any new crypto projects to do whatever it takes to make that project a Success.
so if that involves spending a lot of money on advertisement, promotions, organising seminars and talk shows and going for events or other things in order to bring in investors into that project and make it known to more people in that niche then I believe it is not unethical.
What is unethical is making people invest in a project and not taking the required steps to make that project a success

No matter what they think of the project future, an ICO would never spend more than 30% of the total project fund on promotion; I don’t know where the op got his idea from.

If you talk about project being launched, if they have spent virtually 90% of the fund on promotion, then what will they use to develop the project they want to launch, if there is any ICO doing this, then it is clear that they don’t have a product, and they are just trying to use the system as a money Ponzi scheme.

A genuine project will never waste money that much on promotion, yes to promote is quite expensive, but we are also in this industry together and we all know how things operate, so that ICO cannot just come here and give us a blatant lie.

We allow ourselves advertise their project because we believe they are legit and have a potential to succeed.
However, there is a period only for advertising, in ICO, it's only in the crowdfunding stage but the crucial stage is after they collected the amount raise and how are they going to utilize it.

That is why some are just promising the bounty participants to give the payment but most failed to do so. Or another case is that they lessen the token allocated leaving the participants to retaliate and another story is bounty managers(most devs) run away with the money raised, in short a scam project.

I have never found any project that spend $9M in promotion where they spend $10M from token sale. Do you have any proof in this regard?

Yeah, I've never seen this case too. What kind of management that spend more than 50% of the raised fund for promotion ? I mean, your example is just exaggerating. It is illogical with that fund allocation. Commonly ICOs allocate the fund for marketing and promotion not more than 10% of the total supply or fund collected.

I think the 9 million for promotion alone is an exaggeration. Projects that pays in tokens don't even spend that much on promotion. Most usually state the percentage for  promotions and they are normally less than 20%.

I ask you to notice another moment that companies pay tokens, as well as pay for work and advertising with their own tokens, which have no value.  In fact, new projects have no product and there is no company as such, and therefore it is very difficult to talk about real value here.

I believe that there is no one in this forum that will say spending money on promotion is unethical, that is not the ball of contention here, we know that it cost a lot to run promotions to get people’s attention, but what becomes unethical is when the money spent promotion becomes far more than the project cost.

How is that ethical, if they spend money on promotion and they have created the awareness necessary and it is time for people to really come for the product, then they get stuck because they don’t have enough supply having spent what they would have used for production of advertising few ones that they have.

I don't know what the rule says, but on a personal level I don't think it is, most of these ICO projects won't sell a good number of their tokens if not soft such promotions, so it becomes a necessity kind of to market these tokens to the right investors. That isn't in anyway suppose to be a crime.

There are always ethical questions about any advertising, whether in crypto or in the wider world, around the point that it's just a hard sell of the product rather than a balanced view.
Regarding the % of budget spent on advertising, that should really be declared - so long as the company is open and honest about what they are spending on what, I don't think it's an issue.

In the recent days none of the projects were ready to spend money from their pockets to raise funds for their projects,all they were doing is just creating bounties and paying participants on their own tokens so this is unethical in my opinion.

I don't know what kind of ICOs can spent 90% of funds for promotion. usually for promotion spend 10% or less of raised funds.

Well some give so much for advertising and promotions but in the end they adjust the budget once their ICO raised a small amount only. Try may either deduct stakes allocations or they remove those who are not worth to receive bounty or rewards at all. Its important for a project to advertise their project because its the only way they could gather investors.

Correct but while they planning for promotion and marketing they are allocating such fund but unfortunately most of the ICO did not reach the success on meeting the softcap as well. When look for hardcap reached ICO. Maximum 2 or 3 from 500 ICO projects nowadays.

Balance all the other ICO are not loyal one and they are here to scam us by looting the fund collected on ICO buddy.

I don't see how ethics is being an issue over here. They raise 10 million and spend 9 million for promoting themselves. Well, this is totally up to them on how they are spending their budget on advertising. As long as they don't end up being a scam, then it is all okay to me. Now this would have been a different question if you asked whether it was unethical to advertise for an ICO that has a high chance of scamming.

Impossible. No project owners would tend out to spend almost 90% of its accumulated amount on sale just on promotion/marketing allocation
budget.Most of them will most likely use 2-3% on all total sales.By the way, where did you able to see this kind of allocation? Which project
you are pertaining to?

Although it's just an example, the numbers are a bit extreme. It's impractical to be spending 90% of funds for advertising. I've never seen an ICO spend that much so far. Maybe the more practical approach is allocating 10% to all forms of advertising.

I won't say it's unethical, sofar the  team behind the project are ready to combat any issues that comes after as to the allocation of fund to the project. Every ICO projects has is ow  project allocation and should be followed duly.

As far as I know there are few such companies. Generally everyone uses word of mouth as a promotion of their project. So I didn't hear information that someone spent so much money on advertising.

First, spending 9 million out of 10 million on promotions doesn't look idea, in fact it is not possible how can a project spend almost everything on promotions, how then will they be able to deliver what was promised? ICOs only spend a little amount of the token supply for promotions. Also, advertising or promoting an ICO is a legitimate process and I don't think it contravene or go against any laws.

Fair enough how sure are you worth of that amount can be spent on advertising or promotion? If you are just saying in case only a dumb ass man can make 10k and spend 9k advertising the project, what is left for him to make the project work.

All icos require some form of advertising in order to reach successful sales. I believe the larger percentage of the funding for marketing is from their tokens which is also being put up for the token sale. So they do not really use funds gotten from the token sale itself but they pay for marketing mainly using their tokens

Advertising for ico ain't bad in my opinion because that is the only way that they can reach out to lots of people,  without marketing they can't meet up to their target,  and I don't think any ico can spend more than 80% of fund raised on advertising their products,  which money will they use in developing their project

I have been to a lot of bounty campaign, but I have never encountered an ICO that spend that much, in fact, they only allocate 3 to 6 % of their coin 8% is the highest in advertising their ICO, your post is fake, get the fact first before posting, every bounty hunters knows the fact.

spend much money to promote is good but if that mean you spend almost 90% of total ratio from ico funding then its not good. promote is good but for that much ratio i dont think that worth it. better spend on project that you work

Unethical is when people are promoting scam projects, that can lead to involving more investors and at the end everybody is left with empty pockets, hunters are going to lose their image and time, and investors will lose their money.

Yes they never spend 10% upwards if you just notice some of the ICO in the year 2017 they are reaching their hard capital and sometimes passing hard capital. If you notice they are just giving out the 3% of the whole raised funds in the promotion and not 90%, They can spend 90% but the project will not improve anymore because of insufficient funds.

Any project that intend using that huge ratio for advert will probably be a scam project which at the end of the day might not even pay the advertisers since most of them always want to pay using token which might not get listed in any exchange in years. Most of the time project dev but high percentage for advertisements just to catch hunters but might not pay the actual amount after the work is completed

I do not think they spend in millions on advertising, most icos safeguard themselve by launching different bounty and promotional campaigns where they do jot have to pay in cash and out of pocket rather they pay in a small percentage of company tokens which is the right marketing plan for new projects even if some projects advertise online i do not think their budget goes over several thousands you are just exagerating the advertising expenditure.

Spending 90% of raised amount on promotions is bad business and I doubt anyone will do that. It just doesn't seem plausible. But advertising ICOs is not bad in its own depending on the approach employed.

Advertising is very important for every project, but it is usually spent not more than 20% of collected funds on Marketing, so this is acceptible. To be honest, I have never seen a project spending 90% of funds on advertising.

To properly manage the money the project must first have an experienced CFO (Chief Financial Officer). Otherwise, the project may have financial problems (as an example of a NEM project)

it is very ethical because with us advertising the ICO, the ICO will be better known by many people and it will help sell coins so that the ICO has more potential to succeed and that will also increase our chances of profit in investing in ICO.

It is a normal thing to do but I think the percentage fund for marketing shouldn't affect others things that need funding for the project. A project can only be known through advertisements but marketing is just a one part of developing a project

Many projects are wrong and begin to attract investors in substandard and outdated ways. Now it is very easy to find an investor if you are ready to offer a decent product. And even if the crypto community helps, the project is doomed to success. But the organizers today are only concerned about private investment, because large investors need proof of work.

Yes they dont pay cash but they only pay on tokens however some ico campaigns do also pays in mix btc plus their ico coins ,  or eth and other top cryptos plus thier ico coins  . to be able to do that they will have to use thier own cash or the cash that they have collected thru their presale    . in that way , they can attract more promoters and gives thier ico campaign a good reputation  among others that is only paying a token  . they will also be using a cash to advertise on other sites  if ever they want to be serious on promoting their project

We never know what strategies they have applied by the team owners and financail officers, maybe that is one way of giving a big amount so that it gains a lot of customers purchasing in return it boost the product and company world wide.

Where did you get this information? This is an unimaginably large amount of money to advertise the project. I think that only obviously failed projects can allocate their budget this way.

No need to regret advertising money. Especially if the advertising gives the project to earn much more money than was spent on it.
But if the advertisement did not bring any additional income, then it is bad and you need to punish those who made such mistakes.

I dont think they marketing budget until 90%. Mostly marketing budget not more than 10%. Mostly ICOs budget for development project and developers team. I think it still normal if the marketing budget not more than 10%.

It's not only about the money, you can make money if what you are advertising will succeed as most of the time they will pay.
However, you also to ensure that what you are advertising is legit and will help the crypto space grow, otherwise, it's not worth to enjoy the reward if the project will give bad reputation to the crypto market.

It is a way, to make the ICO get public awareness, not unethical at all.
Because there are many scam ICO's in the past, some social medias ban ICO advertisement.
There are many ways to advertise ICO, but nowadays investors prefer to investing in IEO, advertised on the exchanges.

This has always been and always will be. Very little is spent on advertising and project promotion in relation to the funds raised.Just in addition to advertising, any project also has costs:legal,team salary,rental of premises,payment for utilities.please note that all these costs are borne by the project before the ICO.Generally guys 10% on advertising costs is normal.

who definitely advertise by using services from bounty managers and bounty hunters, DEVs can pay them with tokens that they sell and can be paid after they get the money, it will be different from advertising on Google or others, they have to make more payments by using $

it depends on what kind of ico you are promoting  . if you knew to your self that the ico that you promote is legit then there is no problem with that but if you are aware that an ico is scam or shady and you are still promoting it then that is wrong .

 you will only helping the scammers to earn more income while they wont pay you at the end  . you are also helping other incoscent people to got scammed  . if its done in the forum  , you are risking you account and reputation  .

We are not fully aware of the distribution of funds in the budgets of the ICO. But if we know that a project spends less on developing its product than on promoting it, then perhaps the team is not professional enough, does not work effectively, or hides its true intentions. Therefore, to participate in the project is not worth it.

That should be the first step in writing off a project that one is researching on for participation if they claim that they are spending such amount of money on campaign, and you are right about the fact that any project with success mindset would not even spend more than 10% of their capital, although majority of them are so used to padding the budget to make the project worth the amount they are requesting for.

Most projects will focus more on spending money to develop and produce a quality product and if they have a quality product to showcase to the world, then they don’t need to spend so much more on campaign, since the product has a way of campaigning for itself through references if it is a good one.

While there could be many arguments that could be made about why promoting a particular ico could be a bad idea, I think you are wrong in your points, most icos do not really spend money at all when it comes to their marketing, they make the promise to bounty hunters to pay them in tokens which have no value yet and in most cases this is only 1% of the total supply of those coins, so an ico gathering 10 millions is in fact only spending 100k in its promotion.

I strongly believe that there will not be a single project that can have this type of claim, it is absolutely not possible and unethical, I full understand that advertising can be quite very expensive, especially when you make use of some top media means like CNN, other media and news station, bill board’s advert and co.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, we know that the only means of campaign is virtually through social media, which hunters are the ones doing majority of the advert, so when we see bounty hunters allocation, then we have seen the money allocated for promotion, wherein the highest allocated to hunters is 15%, so it will be a big lie for any project to make such claims.

Crowdsales generally tend to allocate a much lower percentage of their overall budget to marketing and a significant amount of this is typically spent on creating and advertising the initial offering with not enough reserved for future uses like building brand awareness and increasing adoption so avoid investing in any projects that don't have a properly developed marketing strategy

If advertising, it requires reasonable funds and a good target. Of course there is no harm in advertising. If spending funds is only for advertising and minimal fundraising may not be ethical for the development of the project in the future. It's better to make a bounty program to promote a project. And if you really have to advertise in other places, there is also nothing wrong with the project market.

Advertising is very important. But of course you shouldn't forget about the real development of products and platforms. This can often be found in crypto projects. This is a very common mistake.

Where did you get these numbers? All ICOs have their own economic mapping and 99% of them fail...so.... it seems that they are using way too much money on advertisement exactly because they have nothing to show for and they need to get that 1 million to fly away for a no-extradition country...
Let's ask a more pertinent question: do we need ICO's?? Why are there projects that don't ask you for money in advance and still deliver?

No project will spend this much funds to promote their ICO. What most of them do is to spend little amount of bitcoin/ethereum plus their token as payment for anyone that will promote them. And also they use their tokens as full payment for promoters.

Promotion for icos are just something else this time, because I think they are just using hunters to get what they want and will later pay shit money, some will even seized the money and will refuse to pay hunters. Tho I already know ico is a scam but since they havrle gotten what they why can them pay workers. Despite that they want to pay with there token, they are the owner, they will still be stingy to pay good cash.

I think it is fine, as long as the project and their token (if they have any) should  have a use case. Probably they are spending a lot on their investment to hook up more investors. But if they have no other plan but only to advertise, this is not the right thing to do.

Promoting ICOs is legal because there is no regulation yet about ICOs. Beside that, every ICOs have marketing budget and i think its normal because they want peoples know about the project they built. As long they pay bounty hunters, i think its good because give many people an opportunity to invest in the project

Well, if the ICO is genuine
then everything they done will be genuine and legal

Else, the opposite
This is where Whitepaper is written, the money allocation will be written there (But of course you don't fully trust the whitepaper)
DYOR very carefully before you invest

I guess it is unethical because they should be spending their money raised into their product and not into the advertisements. It is better to have a product working than no product and pure advertisements.

I just want to know where you gather information like you say?
we know that ico requires and is big for every marketing plan and management.
but I think what you say is not right, because surely the developer has a team to interpret each expenditure and income in a project.

Do you think that they spent such money for advertising? I am not sure about that. Imagine that most of them do not have enough money for development, why then they would spend money for something that is not really necessary? If they have enough money, why they would need money, when they have enough, if you know what I mean.  ;D

That is not our call to make and no matter how much you complained its developers call to make ,they know what's best for there projects either they succeed or not,its just a shame what ICO projects are turning into these days ,they raised all that huge money and in the end for nothing, I guess they are just making themselves rich is all

Yes I think this is unethical. You don't have to spend 9M$ for promotion. That is not practical. In my own opinion we don't have any expensive promotions because the best way to market ICO and other crypto is the success of the investors coming from crypto or ICO. When it happen we don't have to pay any advertisement.

I believe that a project with strong background will never need to advertise and spend millions on it. Look at Tesla who stopped spending millions of dollars on advertisement and instead started improving their infrastructure which paid off. I think that these days, a project with great potential will go for IEO and not for ICO and IEO exchange take care of the advertisement. IEO that have been conducted on Binance Launchpad have achieved the hard cap successfully every time.

Of course, if you take into account advertising that is paid for in real and big business, then these are really hundreds of millions of dollars.  But if you take into account the Bounty company, through which hunters advertise certain Eco companies, the prices are almost ridiculous.  It is a pity that recently the ico market of companies has been greatly deceiving Not only the investor, but also the Bounty Hunters.  I think if IEO succeeds in taking root in the cryptocurrency market, then the company's ico market may be in danger of disappearing.

If they really used so much money on advertising is unetchical and also if the project fail is a problem and the team should always think for long time and not put a lot of money on advertising, they should create something new which can make a project be successfull.

No project will invest all the monies generated from ICO for advertisement. Also I don't think there is ethical and unethical advertisement ratio, it all depends on the team and how far they want things to reach. But I think every expenditure is budgeted for initially so that there is always no doubt in the air.

Promotion is a must to which there must be mutual development. There are projects that focus completely on promotion without a product and gains a good investment, and finally when launched it goes worth nothing leaving back a loss to all the investors. One such project that I participated and supported is the earth token which had a big hype and finally when listed the price went from $0.05 to $0.00015, no use of holding it anymore.

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Advertising engine of progress. The competition in the world of cryptocurrency is very high and in order for as many people as possible to know about your project you need to spend a lot of money on advertising. Without advertising, you will not be able to talk about your project.

Who is going to spend 9 million on promotion if they only need 10 million to raise???? You don't need to spend that much on promotion or advertising.

Is there so much money needed for promotion? I don't think all projects spend 90% of the money they get just to do promotions because as we know some projects even large projects can succeed only by doing promotions on forums and other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Blogspot and Telegram
it does not require large funds but they can still be successful, the main reason is because this forum, this forum is a place for investors so that when someone can take advantage of this forum well he has done the right promotion

There are quite some good number of ICOs that only use their tokens are means of payment to those who advertised for them. Therefore, with that, it is more or less like not spending anything on it or at most, they pay out negligible amount of fund for such purpose. Another cost effective means some of them use is also through bounty campaigns.

How come you know about the particular amount spent for advertising, that can be. Promoting projects can be one of the best step to take to earn more money and people to know your business so nothing bad promoting, and those mediums used have no problem at times because he creates them to earn..

Most project allocating token not more than 10% from their total supply. This forum used for new project to promote because crypto investor must be looking on this forum. I think thats why many new ICOs make bounty campaign to promote the project through this forum or social media because its more cheap and more effective

I dont think ICOs have 90% marketing budget for the project. If the project are legit, mostly the budget not more than 10% and big portion for developing the project. I dont think advertising ICOs is unethical because it about to attracting more investor

I have not seen a real project pouring 90% of their money into advertising, all of which must pay at least 35% for product development and 10-15% for the team. So at least 50% of the money needed to maintain the project is needed, there are no projects that need a lot of money to advertise as you said.

ICO made more than $22 billion only in the US in 2018 and a big number of ICO had been scams which mean that people lost their money for a white paper which is simply pathetic. ICO is no longer the point of attraction for the potential investors who are looking from profits by investing in early tokens. They have started targeting IEOs. The only option open to ICO is to promote but I fear if promotion would do any good.

Talking of raising money for advertising and the ratio, the project pays for this advertisements only after the ICO fund has been raised. Most of them do not even pay these days.

You read how many big giants such as Coca Cola, Starbucks, Proctor And Gamble and others spend money on advertising. Although they are all well-known trademarks worldwide. Advertising helps you to sell your product and the one who spends a lot of money on advertising increases his chance for a good sale of his product.

I have not seen such an ICO with 90%  promotion allocation. The normal allocation for promotions is 10-20 % It really depends on the product and the project itself how much promotion it needs.

It seems to me that you haven’t looked into the Bounty companies for a long time.  I have not seen ml total pool of bounty companies above 2 or 3%.  Perhaps we are talking about different numbers, but nevertheless, few funds are allocated for advertising in cryptocurrency .

Well pointed. There are companies who have not spent a single dollar on advertisement and have had great demand for their products. I think that it is unethical because if a project in crypto is great enough, it will attract the users without advertisement. Initial exchange offering does not spend millions on advertisement because people on their platform know it is worth investing in IEO.

Advertising is a way of getting out projects to the community. I don't see it that bad. The bad thing is the fact these projects put in more in advertising than actually putting in more to develop the project. Most of them do not even pay for the so called advertisement when it comes to bounty hunting.

Projects should determine the pre-allocated amount according to their pockets. The amount written in the bounty is often not distributed as it is. Most of times the specified reward is reduced.

I don't think the amount for promotion is big like that. Advertising for ICOs is not that big imo, for twitter, facebook and in this forum, you only need to hire a bounty manager to manage it and maybe it takes 5k-10k usd. For ads on google and social media, maybe a bit bigger. Promotion is not really cost big like what you said.

I do not believe they spend such amount on promotions, rather they allocate a percentage of their total supply to promotional activities, and this is only done when they are successful with the public sale. And most times, the allocation for the promotional activities might be reduced depending on what was raised during the public sale.

I can see that it seems these same scammers are gradually trying to inflate ICO platforms too but I am sure that IEO will have more control than ICO, since there is a body who has volunteered to research them and properly verify if they are genuine or not.

One of the strategies I am sure people like Binance will be using is to verify the authenticity of the developers through their KYC, so that when they mess up, they can be reported to the authority. So to always be on a safe side, we must only follow IEO from TOP exchanges like Binance, Binance will never by any means allow every bad project.

Not necessarily.  The ICO phase is the crowdfunding phase - it's where you draw the crowd in.

So it's mostly a marketing phase where you don't have a product yet to show.

The guys behind the ICO are mostly marketers, community managers and designers who build the prototypes and do the crowd communication.

So no, actually advertising is not unethical, it's THE main purpose of an ICO.

Obviously the ICO must have a product/service offering, otherwise it's a scam. It can't just be marketing, but marketing is a big part of it.

Perhaps, the discussion built up due to the resulting drawbacks of ICOs projects that is why people are considering the promotions of it as promotion of wrong thing. But this is not fair for the ICO projects because due the scammers activities cannot put the blame on all ICOs projects because all of them are not offering by scammers’ developers that is why we have to find out good one. Else, follow new IEOs and get start with it.

That figure is just an exaggerated one and way over exaggerated, no project developer will use such amount, that amount is more than enough to build another project if cost of building project is that cheap that they will use 1 million dollars for project and 9 million dollars for promo, if it were to be so, majority of bounty hunter would become so reach by now.

Before that bounty hunting use to pay its hunters, the highest they even budget for all their campaigns is $500,000, not to talk of now that majority of them are now stingy and would want us to work for them for penny.

Promotion is one of the most effective marketing techniques, because it can affect viewers to be buyers of the products offered. In marketing ICO, of course the product offered is a crypto coin made by the developer before being thrown into the trading market.
The main purpose of ICO advertising is to get investors interested in investing in the project before the coin is launched. Of course with the description of the benefits described earlier so that potential investors will invest their money.

$500,000 for the campaigns is not from the team own money, it's usually paid in a token which the team don't spend any money to it. Well advertising ICO to get your token sale sold out like $5m usd or even more is really worth, like what i said before, maybe it only cost 5k-10k usd.

Where did you find this information? I have not seen information in the public domain about how much the company spends on advertising the project and I think that it is illogical to spend 90% of the funds on advertising. ICO projects usually prescribed in a Whitepaper in percentage and that will take funds. And if 9 out of 10 million went to advertising, the project would never have been able to reach the fees.

Sometimes the ICO developer has the initial funding from the investor or their partner to fund the ICO advertisement. Now when we see a lot of bounties popping up, in my opinion this is the right way for them to save on advertising promotions. So their ICO funds are still safe for further development because the average bounty is paid from their tokens.

I doubt the authenticity of this information because since I got to crypto, I have not seen an ICO project that has spent 90% of total raised funds on promotion. If you are talking about airdrop then that's another situation entirely because there has been some projects that has airdropped more than that amount.

Take it easy, I don’t think they spend $ 9 million on advertising. If they had such a budget in 2019. This would be a really powerful project, which does not need a fundraiser. So think that they spend projects on advertising when you open your wallet as a hunter)

Almost all ICOs pay for advertising with their tokens. People who advertise for a project receive a percentage of all tokens sold. Usually in a roadmap you can find how many percent is allocated for advertising. This is usually not more than 5%.