Hi @nearity – thanks for the proposal and your patience with the review process. I’m struggling with this proposal. Here are my thoughts:
- While it’s clear you and your team are able to create and publish a lot of content, which you do consistently, your engagement numbers on your platforms and web site are quite small vs. your audience size and the amount of content you produce. To me, that signals that something is not working. Yes, there may be growth, but I am having trouble connecting the value of the content back to an equivalent value for the NEAR ecosystem.
- We’ve funded your project in the past, so it has had support from the MarketingDAO and quite a bit of funding to allow it a chance to grow and thrive. I am not seeing the incremental improvement that I would like to see for the amount of funding that is going into the project.
- We have new funding constraints since our relaunch and need to be extremely careful that what we fund is not only supporting community initiatives, but also aligning with the NEAR Foundation KPIs laid out in our guidelines. In my view, there is a need to fund projects that bring fairly equal, if not greater, benefit to the NEAR ecosystem than to themselves/their own existence via the funding provided by the community. In this case, it seems to me that $7100 would be of greater benefit to Nearity than to the ecosystem, as the engagement is similar to much smaller accounts and initiatives.
I’m not aiming to criticize you or your team for your efforts, but I want to be straightforward about the issues I am seeing with continued funding under our new structure and current market conditions.
As a way forward, is there a possibility that you would reduce your funding request to the one channel or type of content that is working best for you and your team?
I can’t support this proposal in its current form, but given your dedication to the ecosystem and long-standing participation, would be happy to hear your thoughts on how to align on something that will work on both sides.