AIP-272: Grant $5000 to DAO Times for the Commission of Unbiased Reporting on ApeCoin DAO - 50 articles over one year

Withdrawn AIPs
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Your artwork and stuff is great, and your track record built up shows. Its far superior to my own substacks or websites built. Offering 50 articles in 100 days is simply what I recommend adjusting in this early proposal. I’m a geek that looks at how these proposal read on snapshot hahah. I think you should mention how you’ve delivered to BAYC channels and have connections/network in ape spaces more prominently. What DAO times does is great and you have a proven track record.

This should be powered!

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We want to inform the community that we have updated our proposal in accordance with the suggestions and confusions of the DAO contributors in the comments. We hope that this new version answers more questions and communicates clearly what we propose.

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The current ask is $100/article to be released every 3 days or so. I find this ask reasonable given each article is substantial and not some fluff piece but the delivery cadence makes me question the quality and value.

Releasing an article every 3 days would require constant work for the entire 120 day duration. Every 3 days you have to come up with an angle and collect information to report on, without just regurgitating what’s been posted on the forums. Is this even possible? I can see them all being extremely shallow articles just to be able to hit the requirements of this proposal with maybe a small % of them being substantial.

I understand your ask is low compared to most proposals but that’s somewhat irrelevant if what we are getting isn’t worth the amount paid for. To do anything substantive it would require some time to come up with ideas, research etc. To do this in a daily cadence for 120 days straight is guaranteed to reduce the quality per article.

A more reasonable delivery time frame could be 1 year for the same number of articles but it’s divided into 2 requests. So $2500 for 25 articles in 6 months, and depending on how that goes, you can come back for another.

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Offering 50 articles in 100 days

How would this be practical? Won’t this essentially amount to SEO blog spam?

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Dao Times work certainly speaks for itself, however I don’t love the idea of promising a set number of articles. It’s their decision ultimately on how to title and approach it. I do know their reporting is beneficial and their request for being powered by apecoin is cool, and they havent been spammers!

How they setup their articles and SEO strategy, and how they utilize these funds for their goals is what im interested to see. I 'm confident they are capable and knowledgeable to know whats best.

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Then perhaps a “sponsorship” model can work. We could release the full $5k for a year, and get the same minimum number of articles within that year in addition to them adding a “Supported by ApeDAO” in the footer.

My primary concern is the quality of the articles. One well written article is much much better than 10 spammy shallow articles.

DAOTimes can then use this model with other DAOs as well to get support and have a dedicated reader base.

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Yes @leyota thats certainly one way to do it. As a newsletter writer, I get a grant for 400 apecoin a month for what I do in the DAO, where my deliveries are verified each month automatically. I’ve had positive experiences with DAO times and can attest that they were the first on the scene to really ask about Apecomms, interview our people and what we were doing in October last year.

They did a great job, much like the Gazette does, of reaching out to multiple members and asking great questions. That’s been my experience with DAO times. Would love to see them powered.

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Would the sponsorship model be something you are open to? It would be one article a week for one year which would get to 48 articles. And instead of the last two articles you could have some sort link back to the DAO as a sponsor. This should give your team plenty of time to write substantial articles and it won’t look too spammy to regular readers.

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This could be helpful. Just wonder if it’s necessary to set a hard period of 120 days? maybe one year is better if there are not enough fresh content to fill for the 100 articles.

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@leyota @Land

Your arguments are sound and we appreciate your feedback!

In response, we’ve updated our proposal from 50 articles over 120 days to 50 articles in one year.

We are fine to include a “Supported by ApeCoin DAO” tag in the footer of these articles.

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Why use a metric that’s based on a number of articles over a set time period?

Personally I’d be much more interested in high quality, impactful articles. Impactful being measured by major news articles referencing your own, and the overall view count you generate.

Also for my own clarity, are you proposing news articles, or informational articles?

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I think that would be the preference of most people but the difficulty is with defining the terms and amounts. The chance of being referred by a larger org that can use their article is pretty close to nil because DAOTimes don’t have exclusive access to our forums. The reason other news orgs get quoted is because they had exclusive access which the secondary org can’t verify. Also “major news” is a very wide spectrum.

As with view count, they gave their numbers up above, and if we set a target pretty high all we are doing is setting them up to write controversial or click baity articles which I’m not a fan of.

“a number of articles over a set time period” is the easiest and least restrictive measurement we can use to support an org we like without setting up perverse incentives.

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I will note that I am speaking from direct experience when suggesting a metric based on other news articles citing or referencing the work produced by DAO times. Edit: This is common in research (citing a scientific article), and also raw information (gathering or producing statistics, etc etc.)

I agree that these metrics aren’t perfect, as I don’t believe a “perfect” metric exists for all situations. I just don’t love the idea of the measurement being a set number or articles over a set period of time. That being said, I’m still interested in learning about if the core goal is informational content, or news content. If it’s informational, a specific plan of coverage would be ideal in my eyes.

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I understand but I would never compare a scientific citation to a news article citation. Like I mentioned in the earlier post, the only reason one news org quotes another news org is because they can’t verify and report on it themselves. This is a completely open forum, so any org that wants to report on the DAO can do so easily. So giving them no exclusive information and asking them to use “citations” as a metric seems like an impossible task. The reason it’s common in research is because the citing author doesn’t want to repeat the same experiment so they use the results of someone else’s. This doesn’t apply to news.

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Agreed. My stance is we shouldn’t pay for news articles, as it introduces bias. But if these are informational articles, I’d love to see an alternative metric set.

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If you have to pay to publish an article then you should count it as an advertising expense. In this case the question becomes is the type of advertising that allows the maximum return on investment? How is this return measured? Personally I am against articles published for a fee

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Why use a metric that’s based on a number of articles over a set time period?

We want to use a metric based on article count over time for its simplicity. We agree with you that there is no perfect metric, but we see this as the lesser evil because it clearly communicates our intentions and is easily understandable to the widest majority of contributors, not just those familiar with news production area.

Personally I’d be much more interested in high quality, impactful articles. Impactful being measured by major news articles referencing your own, and the overall view count you generate.

We certainly share your interest in high-quality, impactful articles and our team is capable of creating such content. We have a track record of getting referenced by major news media like Coindesk, Coinmarketcap, The Defiant, and many others.

However, creating such impactful articles and getting them referenced requires extensive efforts and higher budgets. Especially if you guarantee such metrics. For this level of influence and reach, we’d need to request a minimum of $5k per article.

We don’t think we’ve built enough trust with the ApeCoin community to request such budgets just yet. But we believe that your idea to propose such high-impact work could be possible as a separate proposal down the line, after some time collaborating on the small budget. This way, we get to know each other better. How does that sound to you?

That being said, I’m still interested in learning about if the core goal is informational content, or news content.

We propose to blend education, news, information, and potentially interviews to offer diverse and engaging content. As per our proposal, creating an editorial calendar will be our initial step in content production.

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If you have to pay to publish an article then you should count it as an advertising expense. In this case the question becomes is the type of advertising that allows the maximum return on investment? How is this return measured? Personally I am against articles published for a fee

It’s important to clearify that we’re not aiming to produce paid ads or PR articles. Rather, we are seeking to provide unbiased, educational, and informative content that helps a better understanding of ApeCoin DAO’s activities.

We see this funding as a grant donation supporting objective and in-depth reporting, not as a payment for advertising. This approach aligns with our commitment to maintaining editorial independence and avoiding any potential conflicts of interest arising from the source of funding. I hope this provides clarity.

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Sure, it’s just my belief that when an entity pays you to report on it, you cannot truly be unbiased. At a minimum I hope you place a disclaimer on any articles you produce under the grant stating that the article was funded by the ApeCoin DAO.

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Yes, we will place a disclaimer for sure.

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