[COMPLETED] The BlockChat (October, 2022)

Proponent: @bagadefente

NEAR account for payment: bagadefente.near

Duration: September, 26th to October, 25th

Requested Amount: 500 usd in DAI


INTRODUCTION
The BlockChat — Near Friendly Talks is a live streamed online talk show created, produced and presented by myself, Baga Defente, in which I have informal talks with people from different areas, part of the Near ecosystem.

The show works as a space for those guests to present a bit of themselves, talking about their personal journey, motivations, influences, how they discovered the cryptoworld, joined Near Protocol and all that came along.

In each episode we also talk about elements, concepts and technologies we’re discovering while living and working on web3 context, being able to share our experiences with a wider audience. Since July, we’re also been doing NFT giveaways during the show, for people interacting with us via YouTube’s live chat.

Initially created to present and have talks with Brazilian artists, the project is evolving and now I’d like to start chatting with people from other areas, as detailed below.

OBJECTIVES
Produce two more one-hour each episodes of the talk show, broadcasting live via NADA∴Studio Criativo’s YouTube channel.

August was our first month as a DAO, and it was a very busy and full of learnings one, which led us to rethinking our initial ideas. We’re going through internal changes to optimize our process and the funds we’re having access to, so I chose not to make new episodes in September to dedicate more time on organizational things.

Even being presented in our September funding proposal, this is set to produce October episodes. We’re still talking and trying to sync agendas, but our goal is to talk with one or two Brazilian developers from Near Floripa. Soon we’ll have a call to meet each other to see how can we collaborate in future projects, and also decide together if we should have an episode with a three-people talk (two developers as guests) or two episodes with one guest at a time.

If we go for the former idea, the second program of October could be with a non-Brazilian Portuguese speaker community member; I have a few names in mind and, with the proposal approved I’ll contact them to see if our dates match. It’s worth saying that October will be the post-Nearcon month, so it will be nice to talk to people who were able to attend the conference to share their discoveries and impressions (like the developers from Near Floripa and other guests I have in mind).

PUBLIC
The BlockChat intends to reach two different publics:

  1. Portuguese-speaker members of the Near ecosystem, specially from Brazilian and Portugal based DAOs, guilds and communities.
  2. People (still) outside Near, but already interested in (or just curious about) blockchain, NFTs and web3 technologies

This is done promoting the show on social media profiles and community groups (Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Discord), plus boosting posts on the first two. The fact of being live on YouTube is also a form to reach wider audiences from the guests, hosts and crew networks. For these new episodes, if our DAO changes and proposals are approved, we’ll count with a professional focused on marketing and communication strategies to help us to reach more people to watch our show.

The live episodes are all recorded and permanently available to watch after the live streaming at NADA Studio Criativo’s YouTube channel, and we intend to have them all with English subtitles as soon as possible (I’m talking with some people within and outside the ecosystem to see how much this service will costs).

The previous episodes have had an average of 40-50 views during their broadcast, but as you can see below, they continue to be watched later, and this makes me think that having them subtitled in English can be a good strategy to expand the reach of these contents. and, consequently, introduce Near to other people.

TIMELINE

Episode #9
Sep, 26th - Oct, 3rd — pre-production (research, guidelines, advertising)
Oct, 3rd — streaming setup and technical tests with guests
Oct, 4th — episode #9 live streaming
Oct, 5th — NFTs giveaway delivered to winners

Episode #10
Oct, 6 - 17th — pre-production (research, guidelines, advertising)
Oct, 17th — streaming setup and technical tests with guests
Oct, 18th — episode #10 live streaming
Oct, 19th — NFTs giveaway delivered to winners
Oct, 20 - 25th — Project report

BUDGET

  • Planning, pre-production, setup transmission & host: 400 usd in DAI
  • Divulgation (graphic & video pieces for social media): 50 usd in DAI
  • Promoted posts: 50 usd in DAI
  • Total = 500 usd in DAI

PREVIOUS PROPOSALS AND REPORTS

PREVIOUS EPISODES PLAYLIST

As always, feel free to comment, sugest or leave your impressions.
Thanks!

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THE BLOCKCHAT — Near Friendly Talks project report

Project Status: COMPLETED

Project accounting

The project had its timeline changed, with episode #09 streamed on October 10th instead of 4th, and episode #10 just on November 8th because of the guest’s agenda in both cases. October was Brazil’s election period, which happened in two turns, so almost all the attention (and tensions) were on this during this whole month between 1st and 2nd rounds. But now the two episodes were aired and below you can read our considerations about it.

Highlights & comments

EPISODE #09

Short URL: bit.ly/blockchat09

Our first episode with two guests, @JohnFaus and @eliaspintanel, actors, writers and members of Notívagos Burlescos Theater Association. They’re doing a nice job through Near ecosystems, on a series of projects with the support from the Writers’ Guild and NADA DAO mixing IRL with online events — they even created a virtual theater headquarters in the metaverse! So we had a lot to talk about over the episode’s 75 minutes.

As we started doing since episode #05, the guests and I created a NFT to do a giveaway during the show, but I guess I took too long to roll the dice and the people left at the end of the episode didn’t seem interested in NFTs, as nobody tried to win. It’s sad, because it’s this beautiful videopoem below:


EPISODE #10
(with experimental autogenerated English subtitles available)

Short URL: bit.ly/blockchat10

In this episode I talked to @whoiscavenaghi, one the first brazilians (and probably the first brazilian woman) to be part of the Near ecosystem. Carol is the creator of the web3 NFT card game Electric Neon and has been experimenting with AI in artwork creation before those easily usable text-to-image prompts apps, so we talked about questions related to her experience on all that over this episode’s 65 minutes.

For the giveaway, she created exclusive NFT arts inspired by verses from some poems I wrote. We usually give away 3 editions of the NFT created, but as she’s currently only doing one edition NFTs, after the live raffle she decided to create one more artwork for the giveaway. Both were raffled and later sent to the winners. Here’s her creations:


Advertising pieces

There’s also the video invites I made for each episode, but I just posted then on Instagram stories and don’t know a way to share here, but they can be seen on The BlockChain highlights at NADA’s Instagram.

Metrics


Learnings

These two episodes, like all the others, were successfully streamed, the interviews were rich, exploring different perspectives and experiences related to artmaking, web3 technologies and the Near ecosystem, presenting those themes to new people and exploring them with who’s already interested in it. Even being suspicious coming from myself, in my opinion the show is fulfilling its proposal, presenting people and concepts related to artmaking inside web3, specially the ones from the Near ecosystem. As a “side effect”, we’re also creating a historical register from Brazilian artists inside Near.

On average we have about 20 viewers per livestream, up to around 50 views during the first week after streaming, and the numbers show that the episodes keep being watched over time. We can see these numbers from many perspectives: it’s a good number if we think of those people inside a room, like it was a IRL event, but it can also look like a not so good number for the online world, where “influencers” reach thousands of people. But we are here talking about something new and niched. And, if we think that there are some really big web3 projects with only 38 daily “active users”, things look a little better for us.

As I said on the last The BlockChat proposal before this one, “it’s been really hard to do things by myself, especially the advertising part”. After wrote that, we intend to have someone focused on work our social media profiles, including The BlockChat advertising, but them the projects funding stand by came and we weren’t able to bring this person, our Social Media and Community Manager to work with us, and I ended doing this episodes divulgation by myself again. And to bring more people to the show, we need to do some things, as I share next.

Next steps

The 10th episode is the season finale of The BlockChat first season. We will put the project on hold until we are able to put more efforts on divulgation, with other people focused on this, because it’s really hard for me to do more than I’ve been doing (posting on profiles, tagging for visibility, sharing on telegram and whatsapp groups. Even promoted posts may have to be done differently, because they’re making metrics (likes, shares, interactions) higher, but this isn’t reflecting on people watching the show.

Besides this, there’s another changes that we intend to do for the next season, some that I already talked about here on the proposals:

  1. Multistream: also streaming on Instagram (our main social media platform), to reach a wider audience, not necessarily aware of web3, blockchain, NFTs and alike. We made some tests, created layouts and all is good, but to do this with quality and security I need to change some of my equipment (notebook and router), which I intend to do over the next weeks.

  2. Subtitles: having English subtitles will allow us to advertise the already streamed episodes for a totally new audience, people already inside the Near ecosystem that wants to know more about Brazilian artists on Near. Being hour long episodes, the costs for this service are higher, but I found a way to automate a big part of it using YouTube tools. The last episode already has English subtitles available, but it’s autotranslated from the autogenerated Portuguese one, so we should have a lot of errors on both. We will evaluate the needs and costs to correct the English ones, but our wish is to start a possible season two with all season one episodes with revised English subtitles available.

  3. Cuts: another idea to advertise the show is to extract short videos with interesting talks from each video (including English subs) and promote them on social media and groups, trying to increase the interest in the show.

  4. Go beyond Near: the first season was focused on promote and present brazilian artists already inside Near, but for season two we intend to change this, also talking with developers and entrepreneurs on Near, but also chatting with cryptoartists not (yet) on Near, which can contribute to bring part of their audience to the show and even onboarding them on the ecosystem — all without stopping talking to Portuguese-speaking Near artists.


Feel free to ask questions, give suggestions or anything that can contribute for this project. Thanks for everyone that watched or helped in some way, specially the wonderful guests I had :pray:t5:

See you next year on The BlockChat season two! :cowboy_hat_face: :sparkles: :rocket:

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awesome work! Thank you!