# Creator Contests

## TLDR

Fund the Calabara team with 60 ETH to continue developing Creator Contests, a proliferation tool allowing Nounish projects to run decentralized marketing campaigns, for a 3 month period.

## The problem

Twitter contests are an effective means for Nounish projects to spread their meme, attract new creatives, and generate novel interest. They can be utilized to align the incentives of a given project and contributors towards driving creation and distribution. In other words, they are an excellent marketing and proliferation tool.

The Noun Square has had great success with this model, achieving a steady rate of growth and continuously attracting makers to their creative pipeline. So why don’t more projects follow suit?

Twitter contests are an administrative nightmare. The process of fetching submissions, importing them to a judging platform, collecting wallet addresses, and handling payouts can involve up to 3 hours of total admin overhead.

## Creator Contests ... WTF?

Creator Contests are an open-source proliferation tool, allowing any Nounish community to create decentralized marketing campaigns by auctioning ETH, ERC-721's, or ERC-20's to creators through token-gated twitter contests.

Creator Contests eliminate 90% of the management process, allowing any project or pod to run an entire contest with as little as 15 minutes of total administrative overhead.

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## Why Twitter?

Twitter has cemented itself as a content distribution behemoth. As the digital public square, it is one of the best channels for proliferating Nounish creations to the world. We're focused on bringing Nounishness as close to the public-edge as possible, and we're only scratching the surface of social layer integrations.

## Use Cases

There are 2 main use cases, each taking a slightly different approach to planning, content creation, and distribution.

## Nouns ecosystem projects

Through Creator Contests, Nounish projects and pods can launch open-source marketing campaigns, rewarding both new and existing community artists, storytellers, memers, and other creatives who can help spread their brand.

In this system, community operators launch a contest and automatically send an announcement tweet with the necessary details. This tweet serves as an invitation for creatives to craft content and potentially win the ETH or ERC tokens being auctioned following a token-gated community vote.

Creatives who wish to participate in the contest are also responsible for distribution through social media. They do this by quote tweeting the announcement tweet with their submission, helping spread the word about the project through their Nounish creations.

Contests are designed to be completely configurable, with flexible options for rewards, submission and voting requirements, voting strategies, and more - allowing projects to experiment with different incentive systems and implementations that align with their unique goals.

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Here are some of the ways Twitter contests could be utilized for different projects:

**AI pod** - show off their latest and greatest models while onboarding new creatives to AI.

**Composables** - recently hosted a contest in which they observed 30+ new collections and 1000+ new traits uploaded to their platform and shared on twitter.

**Esports** - host "best-clip" tournaments or open-source the creation of nounish gaming heads.

**SharkDAO** - source and vote on community art pieces to mint as open-editions from the DAO.

**Gnars** - "Skate Your City Series". Worldwide digital skate competitions hosted by Gnars, run on Creator Contests, judged by GnarsDAO.

**Builder DAO projects** - run contests to help the community find their meme.

For Nounish projects and pods, creating and distributing ***their own*** meme is critical for the path to sustainability, attracting new creatives, growing the brand, and deploying cool s**t. Creator Contests are the final piece in allowing projects to implement a microcosm of the virtuous cycle.


## Nouns Contests

Integrations between the blockchain and social media allow Nouns to take a different approach to decentralized marketing. We propose an experimental form of targeted external distribution, where we flip the contest model on its head.

High quality content creation is nearly a non-issue for NounsDAO. Hundreds of ETH flies out of the treasury each week to fund initiatives such as the Ordinary Folk video, the $200k video contest, and more. More often than not, the DAO is left with an amazing product, primed for proliferation and distribution.

We have a tool that uses NFT's to curate submissions, but we need a tool that uses NFT's to create submissions. Instead of using token-gated votes to select winners in open contests, we propose using a raffle system where participants must hold certain pre-configured tokens (such as a punk or ape) and share Nounish content on social media in order to enter.

**Example A**

NounsDAO puts up 10 ETH to market the Oridinary Folk video. To enter the raffle, entrants must
1) Share the video on Twitter
2) Hold a punk, ape, or something else preconfigured by the DAO.

Once a participant verifies proof of wallet and account ownership, they are oficially counted as an entrant. When the contest ends, 1 entrant is randomly selected and the 10 ETH is distributed to their wallet.

**Example B**

There is a current Prop House round posting 25 ETH to create a decentralized marketing team - asking proposers to explain how they will get people to enter the main $200k video contest. Imagine if instead, the organizers created a short explainer video and raffled 10 ETH to a random Punk holder that shared it on twitter.

Remember that foobar tweet about getting ETH to market for Nouns? It turns out it's not such a crazy idea. This model allows NounsDAO to achieve mass proliferation *outside* of the ecosystem, and creates incentives for influential token holders to extract additional utility out of their NFT's.

*If Prop House is a decentralized Y-combinator, Creator Contests are a decentralized creative agency - experimenting with a new paradigm for marketing in web3 and beyond.*

## Status

We launched in September, and have since helped groups like TNS, Composables, SharkDAO, and others award 8 ETH and 25k ERC20 tokens to proliferators. We've received a total of 582 submissions across 20 contests. SharkDAO gave us a small grant to build the underlying infrastructure, and NSFW did the same to help us implement twitter integrations, which came online in November.

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## Submissions

Take a break from the technical jargon to check out some of the awesome creations we've seen so far.

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<p><i>@anufo204 - TNS holiday contest</i></p>
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<img src="https://i.imgur.com/RLhb8Cx.jpg"
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<p><i>0xdariush - TNS holiday pfp contest</i></p>
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<p><i>@Ekko_Crypto - TNS 9999 pfp contest</i></p>
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<img src="https://i.imgur.com/dyWeNuF.jpg"
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<p><i>@kimmydeuk - TNS seneca pfp contest</i></p>
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<p><i>@yuniart105 - TNS 4156 pfp contest</i></p>
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<p><i>@darko_eth - SharkDAO comic strip contest</i></p>
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<p><i>@modrovsky - create on composables contest</i></p>
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## Roadmap

Over the 3 months, we will work in a rapid development cycle that can be split into 3 main phases. Of course, part of this process will involve collecting continuous feedback from key stakeholders for improvements.

**Phase 1:** Transcending MVP mode. 8 weeks
* Refactor critical infrastructure.
* Efficiency is currently a technical bottleneck for us. We're planning to optimize the core infrastructure to support our ambitions and match current demand. Part of this work will be focused on addressing various technical challenges involved with our Twitter services and optimizing some of our custom solutions that aren't neccessarily implemented in the Twitter API.
* Support native video and other creative formats.
* Supporting video is an obvious unlock for both creative expression and impressions / engagement.
* Simplify contest initialization process.
* To date, we've subsidized the user experience for the participant side of the equation. Simplifying contest setup will be critical for adoption.
* Add social impression graphs
* Will be key for measuring success transparently and tracking real-time engagement data for campaigns.
* UI/UX redesign
* UI: It's time for CC to get nounish. We're planning to do a complete nounish refactor, with new logos, fonts, layouts and more. This will be a continuous WIP and won't be a blocker for phase 2.
* UX: After running contests for 4 months, we've compiled a laundry list of improvements that we're ready to implement to create the best user experience.
* Support voting for token delegates

**Phase 2:** NounsDAO Marketing Campaign. 2 weeks

We'll build a seperate user interface, called Nouns Contests, to support the NounsDAO decentralized marketing initiative. With most of the heavy lifting taken care of in the first phase, we'll be able to stand these features up quickly. 10 ETH of the budget is allocated to run the first campaign. When development is complete, we'll host a vote (through creator contests) for Nouners to decide

1. What they want to proliferate.
2) Who they want to proliferate it.

As an example, Nouners could say that they want punk and ape holders to proliferate a video produced by the Nounish team.

**Phase 3:** Wrapping up

* Open access to our API
* Add vote audit reports
* Experiment with new restriction strategies
* Weighted token
* i.e. Nouns count for 5 votes, Lil nouns count for 1
* Discord roles, allowlist, etc.

## Defining Success

We'll be targeting the following KPI's for this funding period:

* reward 250+ nounish creatives
* achieve 350k+ social impressions
* proliferate 2000+ nounish creations
* onboard as many nounish projects as possible

Success for us is also tightly coupled with onboarding. We’ll define onboarding for the scope of this project as the following:

* New creatives
* Attract new creatives to Nouns and extension communities through contests
* Between Nounish extension communities
* Increase the discoverability factor of extension projects and communities through different contest designs and synergies, i.e.
* TNS and Gnars co-host a round
* Multi-community voting

We’d also like to answer the following questions:

* Are voter rewards a feature or a bug?
* Are NounsDAO decentralized marketing campaigns a viable system for external proliferation?
* In the voting period, how impactful are visible vote totals on a communities ability to choose the “best” submissions?
* Does submission history serve as a relevant talent repository for other pods?
* Are deep Twitter integrations viable for other tasks, like governance? (Nouncil, Nerman, etc)
* Are there ways to maintain a certain level of submission quality without directly moderating submissions?

## Beyond

Assuming this project is a success, after the 3 months we plan to turn our attention to a trustless, on-chain implementation. We will kick this off by forking the contracts developed by the Prop House team. In doing so, we can begin to think about layering Creator Contest features into Prop House, assuming it would be of interest to the PH team and the community. In our opinion, the most efficient and productive approach would be to allow both projects to continue solving for unique challenges in their focus areas, with the intention of eventually unifying and merging the learnings both projects will bring to the table, all under one killer app for both builders and proliferators.

## Team

Weez: frontend dev, designer, UX, support
Nick: lead dev, fullstack

We were both first introduced to Nouns by way of SharkDAO, which we first joined over a year ago. Soon after, we started developing tools to ease some of the unique challenges of a Nounish subDAO. Last Spring, the community funded us with 7 ETH to begin developing Creator Contests. We launched our first contest in September, and have helped fund 60 nounish creatives with 8 ETH and 25k ERC-20 tokens since.

2 months ago, we received a small grant of 8 ETH from NSFW to develop our Twitter Integrations. We have groups like SharkDAO, Composables, TNS, and the Society of Nounish Cartoonists running contests as we speak. We are now ready to take Creator Contests to the next level.

## Budget

Total: 60 ETH

50 ETH for continued development

* 30 ETH to team wallet upon execution
* 20 ETH streamed over 3 months

10 ETH to fund the first decentralized marketing campaign. These funds will stay in the multisig, and will be distributed directly to the winner.

3/5 Signers:

Nick: nickdodson.eth
Benbodhi: signed.benbodhi.eth
Juan: juanx.eth
JoshuaFisher: joshuafisher.eth
ToadyHawk: toadyhawk.eth

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#### More details

Project operators can start a contest by creating a prompt that asks for submissions in a certain medium, such as art, lore, crafts, memes, jokes, or anything else. The prompt should be centered around a particular theme or idea.

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After defining the deadlines, the contest designer will choose 1) who gets to submit and 2) who gets to vote. Either can be based on any erc-20/721/1155, but most contests are designed without any submission restrictions.

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Next, the contest designer chooses the reward structure for the winning submissions. Any amount of eth or erc-20/721 can be programmed as the reward for any rank. Admins also have the option to reward voters that correctly choose the winning submissions in order to experiment with unique incentive systems.

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After defining rewards, the administrator will choose a voting strategy, or how voting power is calculated. We currently support 2 strategies - Token based and Arcade - with plans to add more in the future. Token based is straightforward, similar to how Nouns governance works, while the Arcade strategy alotts a uniform voting power to each qualifying voter. (i.e. Nouns holders of any amount will each receive 20 votes).

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Finally, the operator has options for some additional parameters. Afterwards, the announcement tweet is automatically sent from the project account and the contest has officially begun.

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#### Submitting

Participants can either head to the contest interface or twitter to create their submissions.

1. If a participant submits through the contest interface, the submission is auto Quote Tweeted for them from their account.
2. If a participant Quote Tweets on twitter, the platform pulls the submission into the interface.

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#### Voting

Finally, qualifying voters spend their voting power on the best submissions and tokens are distributed based on the reward criteria.

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