I don't feel this belongs in Altcoin Discussion since it's a rather big issue if you think about it. Disclaimer: I use the term 99% here not as a literal figure, but as a figure of 'what seems to be'. If that makes sense. I would use the term "most" instead, however "most" could mean 60%, and 99% is far more accurate in this instance than 60%. This post is not a rant, but an observation that bewilders me.
The issue
If we stop and pause for a minute, we'll realize that 99% of ICOs are absolute garbage for one simple reason: They're allocating 2% or so of their token supply to bounty hunters.
Now, this in and of itself would be fine if the bounty hunters gave real conversions to projects. There's no doubt that conversions do happen, however 99% of ICO teams seem to be completely lacking in common marketing or business sense despite whatever impressive LinkedIn profiles they have simply due to the fact that they'd distribute 2% or so of their token supply to people without conducting any form of pixel or conversion tracking to see how effectively these people promote their ICO/project.
It's web marketing 101 that you should be tracking every conversion, and know the conversion rate of all of your promoters. If you're running AdWords, Facebook Ads, or hiring a promoter to promote your business, you're definitely tracking every conversion in order to measure your ROI. No businessman in existence would run a web marketing campaign without knowing its conversion rate. This is excusable in TV, print and radio advertising where it's impossible to do so, but not the Internet. Such incompetence to track conversion sources would only allow one to retain a living in a governmental, charity or other subsidized position. Definitely not in a business.
Which now begs the question, how come all of these ICOs are allocating huge sums of money to bounty hunters with no form of pixel or cookie tracking to monitor conversions? They could simply request all participants to add "?uniqueID=186" for example at the end of their link, and now the conversion rate of each individual bounty hunter can be direclty monitored. Now you can pay 2-10% bounty directly to your bounty hunters depending upon how many actual conversions they acquired for you. Gone entirely is the need to filter through tens of thousands of bot and spam accounts that don't give you any conversions.
The real benefit to doing this? Now you can finally attract real promoters. And this is the heart of my post; the reason many ICOs fail to reach their soft cap is because no serious promoter would touch a bounty campaign with a ten thousand foot pole. I for one am not interested in writing articles or promoting an ICO on my personal facebook because I know if I do, many people would buy into the ICO based off my recommendation since I rarely do such promotions. My friends also know I'm not a shill, so if i make a recommendation they'd take it seriously. The problem is I'd be sharing my stakes with scammers, spammers and spam bots which give 0 conversions to an ICO. Even worse, and based on my past experience, these spam bots or "copy pastas" often get higher staking allocations than legitimate accounts or incredibly well written articles due to bounty managers neglecting their duty due to either their incompetence or corruption.
The fact 99% of ICOs use such a system to pay random people on this forum their project tokens shows me that their extensive business resumes are in fact quite useless. With all of that business experience, surely they'd be interested in running some basic conversion tracking on their bounty hunters?
Which thus leads to my final point. If the above is true, then we can logically conclude that 99% of ICOs don't have any basic business or marketing sense, despite whatever verified resumes and ICOBench 5 star reviews the teams might have. No legitimate business would pursue web promotional avenues that give away 2% of their capital without monitoring conversions. So who are all these business people launching ICOs then? The only person that would pursue these promotional avenues are obviously members of BitCoinTalk forum. In fact I'd bet nearly every ICO has had a member of BitCoinTalk forum as the CEO on an alt account. Because how else could such lunacy transpire? It's the only logical explanation to this phenomenon.
So in essence, ICOs are mostly run by people on a single Internet forum and not by mainstream business leaders. This means the entire ICO sphere is missing out on vast amounts of business experience outside of this forum. How can ICOs ever be taken seriously by the mainstream public with these realizations?
I'm glad you didn't attack the bounty hunters. You've addressed it's obviously the ICOs fault for not tracking conversions.
However, how do you track someone viewing a post and then searching for it Google or checking out the project a later time? How do you track the word of mouth, which is so powerful in these days?
As a CPA marketer, the only crypto marketing campaigns I've seen are those stupid "BTC millionaire" scams. I would hate to see a quality project resort to those networks. You could say that a quality marketing team could do the job, but how do they track the conversions made from people in VC, face to face, etc. They could use referral links, but that's an immediate turn off for many investors. I'd prefer to be able to research the project on my own and not have to worry about using someone's link.
