commemorative art by ilustradora, mint for free on zora
A One-Minute TL;DR Video:
(Click GIF to Watch)
Propdate:
We posted a thorough TNS Season 2 onchain update on Propdates.wtf yesterday, which covers much of the same material found in the first half of this proposal. If you have already read our Propdate (thank you), skip ahead to the Section "Our Guiding Goals for Season 3." Otherwise, please read on! ⌐◨-◨
Proposal Summary:
The Noun Square Onchain Media Collective is one of the most committed, effective and Lindy teams ever funded by Nouns.
We have been making an impact on our community daily throughout Season 2 via Spaces, art contests, community support, video content and more, with a highly engaged network of fans that has produced nearly 6 Million unique content impressions so far this year on X alone.
We've responded to Nouner feedback and leaned down our operations this year as much as possible, shifting focus to the creation of more rich video content, including a promising new weekly video podcast called Zero Rights Reserved, which has racked up over 350,000 views across our socials in just 4 months.
We've also been trailblazers when it comes to Nouns on Ethereum L2's, onboarding our community to Optimism, Zora Network and soon BASE through various initiatives and educational content.
Unique among funded Nouns projects, we have raised more than 20 ETH in operations funding from non-Nouns sources so far this year, and have stretched our previous 6 month mandate to 9+ months.
Today, we are requesting 130 ETH (~6 Noun auctions at current FMV) to support the growth of our various initiatives for 6 more months.
Educational media and onboarding resources are an integral Public Good for the Ethereum ecosystem, and when a Nouns-funded initiative like TNS brings consistent value to our own sphere, while also spreading that love to other onchain communities... we think that's Nounish to the core.
Last Season, On The Noun Square...
A Short List of Notable Things We Accomplished During Season 2:
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We have remained steadfast in our commitment to act as a reliable daily touchpoint for the nouniverse, hosting more than 500 Noun O' Clock LIVE shows in a row without missing a single day, accumulating almost 40,000 total Spaces listens year-to-date and impressive overall engagement metrics from our X Community, including an average of 20,000 impressions, 215 Likes and 112 Re-Posts PER DAY.
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After receiving Nouner feedback, we pivoted much of our team energy into creating more pieces of engaging video content like "This Week in Nouns", Educational Tutorials, and our new weekly video podcast Zero Rights Reserved.
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We scaled back our original project scope considerably by sunsetting/"open-sourcing" the SoapBox program (more on this below), and leaned down the core team to do more with less, ultimately stretching a 6 month engagement to 9+ months.
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We have raised a total of 20+ ETH so far towards the funding of our operations and contests via a combination of trial sponsorship collaborations with values-aligned groups, non-nouns grants awards, and our daily NOMO Edition mint proceeds.
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We have positioned ourselves as a vanguard of nounish activity on Ethereum L2, educating and onboarding our community to the Optimism network via NOMO, the Zora Network through our weekly podcast open editions, and soon the BASE L2 with our imminent Yellow Collective launch.
1) Consistency and Community-Building
So far this year, we have hosted 311 consecutive Noun O' Clock LIVE X Spaces, bringing our lifetime running total to 510 straight Spaces. If you include our various other nounish Spaces as well, the total year-to-date jumps to 857 Spaces, which equates to 921 total hours on air, or a total of 38 full days of broadcasting nounish content, with a total of 37,800 cumulative listeners.
YTD stats from Superspaces.ai
On top of our daily Spaces participation, we have seen tremendous X/Twitter timeline engagement from the TNS community on our art contests, video content and other daily posts, with an impressive 5.9 Million impressions so far year to date, which equates to nearly 20,000 impressions, 215 Likes and 112 Re-Posts per DAY. We've also completely organically grown our following by almost 100% to 9100 followers, which makes us the largest nounish account by follower count on X after @nounsdao and our friends at @nounsesports.
YTD stats from X.com
In addition to serving as a consistent and reliable content hub for Nouns fans, we have also strived to be a helpful media liaison to nounish subDAOs and funded Nouns projects, helping to coordinate and host Twitter/X events, Discord events and more, and generally amplify their messaging to our network.
Some examples of this kind of community support:
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Supporting the "Nouns: A Movie" team by coordinating and hosting a watch party for their Rise of Blus Episode 1 Premiere, and amplifying their various announcements and initiatives like open casting calls, etc.
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Supporting the Nouns AI pod by cohosting a weekly Update Call in our Discord that was free for anyone to join and keep up to date on what that team was building, as well as general news from the AI space. (Example archive recording.) We also produced this awesome video summarizing everything Nouns AI accomplished in 2023.
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Supporting Nouns Esports by amplifying various contests and announcements, co-hosting weekly Twitter/X Spaces, and hosting a live watch party by request during their TI12 faceoff against Gaiman Gladiators.
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Collaborating with Nouns Agora to host a Nouns Governance Discussion most weeks on X Spaces with Yitong.
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Supporting Brennen's Tavern project by recently moving one day per week of Noun O' Clock LIVE to tavern.fm. (Not a Nouns-funded project per se, but Brennen is a Nouner and we like the duck.)
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Collaborating with Lil Nouns DAO's The Lil Nouns Show, and producing a feature video on their funded Lil Bevs proposal (tentative release date late November.)
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Collaborating with subDAOs such as Lil Nouns DAO, Gnars, Food Nouns, Nouns Amigos, Nouns Japan, NounsCN, Nouns BR and more to host and cohost regular spaces for their communities.
Discovering and Empowering Nounish Artists:
Our art contests have continued to be very popular in terms of engagement, and also continue to impress in terms of quality and quantity of output. Here are a couple examples of winning entries from some of our many art contests this year:
Nounish Halloween Contest
TNS Anniversary Art Contest Winners
We constantly see new people tuning into our Spaces and engaging with our content, asking questions about Nouns, etc. in the days following an art contest. This is part of the reason why we have centered the vision of our upcoming Yellow Collective launch around funding and empowering as many nounish artists and creatives as possible (more below.)
Crowd-Sourced "FOMO" Auction Settling:
Speaking of art, another way that TNS has contributed to the Nouns ecosystem is by making a fun daily spectacle of choosing the new Noun of the Day on Noun O' Clock LIVE.
With the help of our audience, we have settled some pretty amazing Nouns this year, including some special ones for occasions, such as a Halloween Ghost, a Birthday Cake for Aug 8, a Black Cat for Token 666, etc. Some of these aesthetic Nouns have sold at auction for above-average prices, even despite the fork dynamic. Noun 658 (Dark Factory) for example sold for 51 ETH, a full 25 ETH more than the average Noun was going for at that time.
We also challenged ourselves earlier this year to try and mint every unminted Noun head, and succeeded just prior to the 2nd Nouniversary. We then challenged ourselves again to mint all the newly added heads as quickly as possible, and succeeded in less than 2 weeks. As a result, Proposal 401 was able to award every contributing artist an existing Noun with their own created head.
Here is a small selection of the many very aesthetic Nouns we helped to mint so far this year:
2) A Fresh Focus on Video Content:
During the earliest months of this season, TNS was producing and facilitating an average of 40 Twitter/X Spaces per week for various nounish communities. We sought and received feedback from nouners and our audience, and learned that their favorite content was our educational/informative video content on YouTube and TikTok, and so we decided as a team to shift our resources and attention towards increasing the production of this kind of rich media content on a more regular basis.
Since that time, we have been producing an average of 5-8 high quality pieces of video content per month. Here are some notable examples of content produced by TNS this year:
This Week in Nouns Series (FKA Prop Talk): A 3 minute weekly video summarizing everything exciting that's happening in Nouns. Primarily an X-native release, these have received a combined 70,000+ views so far this year.
(Click GIF to Watch Video)
Crypto Advocacy / Gitcoin: Nouns doesn't celebrate its wins often enough, so we decided to make a short video about our 100K donation to the Gitcoin Crypto Advocacy Round. This piece of evergreen content has received nearly 30,000 views so far.
Nouns AI pod asked us to produce an engaging video about everything they had built in 2023. This was primarily an X release, but you can also watch it here on YouTube.
Tutorials and Educational Videos About Onchain Life: Our community loves learning about Ethereum, how to use L2s, how to apply for grants, etc. and our TNS Tutorials Series helps them along that path. Our Tutorials videos have accumulated over 50,000 views this year across our socials.
(Click Image to Visit Playlist)
Notable Video Archives of Popular Twitter Spaces Events such as our All About that Base event featuring Jesse Pollak, this Nouns RageQuit Debate moderated by the Verbs team, this open discussion of Private Voting, this CC0 Round-table with Danny Cole and David Horvath, etc.
The Zero Rights Reserved Podcast: We are 16 episodes in so far and growing in popularity, with over 350,000 views so far in 4 just months. (More on this initiative in the dedicated section below.)
In addition to our long-form content, we have also continued to leverage our TNS TikTok Accounts to repurpose shorter versions of our videos, and platform-native shorts. We've continued to grow our English language and Brazilian Portuguese language accounts this year to a combined 38,500 followers, and have received over 150,000 views on our short videos there YTD.
Year-to-date, our video content has received over 650,000 views across our socials, with 70% of that content coming in the latter part of the Season following our renewed emphasis on video production. We hope to continue this momentum into Season 3 and surpass 1 million+ video views over the next 6 months.
3) The Zero Rights Reserved Podcast: Early Signs of Success
Zero Rights Reserved is a weekly video podcast that we launched in June as part of our renewed focus on creating more rich digital media. It is a podcast about Nouns, DAOs, Ethereum, Art and more, and our goal is to interview interesting guests from around the onchain space from a Nounish perspective, while entertaining and educating our audience and bridging gaps to other like-minded communities.
So far, the podcast has been getting very good feedback from listeners both inside and outside the nouns community, as well as from the guests that we have hosted so far:
Here is the list of our incredible guests so far:
- Jack Butcher (Checks, Opepen, Visualize Value)
- Bob Burnquist (Skateboarding Legend)
- Dan Romero (Farcaster Founder)
- Luca Netz (CEO Pudgy Penguins)
- Chris Waters and Eric Towner (Stoopid Buddy)
- Supriyo (Atrium, Nouns: A Movie)
- Nate Angell (Creative Commons)
- Azeem Khan and Ben West (Gitcoin)
- Chris Carella (Purple, Energy)
- Psych (Cofounder Deadfellaz)
- Snax (Founder, Pizza DAO)
- CryptoPunk Noah (Artist, Prev Christie's, Yuga)
- Amanda Terry (Cofounder, OnChainMonkey)
- Aubtoshi (Nouns OTG)
- Ed Balloon (Artist, Musician)
- Binji Pande (Optimism Collective, OPLabs)
Upcoming guests (already recorded): Vinnie Hager, Grace and Brian Guan (founders of Unlonely.)
ZEROPOD has also proven to be our most popular piece of recurring video content so far, racking up over 350K impressions across TNS socials for the first 16 episodes. Podcast subscriptions and downloads are all steadily growing, and from a human-impact perspective, the initiative has been a great bridge to other values-aligned communities such as Gitcoin, Checks/Opepen, Deadfellaz, OnChainMonkey, Optimism and more. We have started to see more and more people from these other communities joining Noun O' Clock LIVE regularly to learn more about Nouns after having their interest piqued by the pod!
Our goal for this next season is to continue to grow the podcast, exceeding 1 million views across our socials for all episode content, while continuing to attract similar high-caliber guests, and spending more resources on repurposing this abundance of nounish content into shorter vertical videos for use on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts.
We have also been minting each episode of ZEROPOD as a special ONCHAIN collection on Zora using the Zora L2 network. You can check them out and mint them all for free here.
Like all of our content at TNS, and as the name would imply, Zero Rights Reserved is fully CC0, and we have started to compile a simple repository of both raw and edited footage that anyone is free to use however they see fit. You can view and use the repository here.
We believe ZEROPOD has the potential to become our co-flaship production alongside Noun O' Clock LIVE. The former bringing in nouns-curious eyeballs from all over the web 3 space, while the latter acts as an effective sieve to catch artists and creatives and help them find ways to contribute meaningfully to the community.
4) A Note About Team Adaptability
As mentioned previously, in the early part of this year, TNS was managing and facilitating up to 40 Twitter Spaces per week for communities such as Gnars, Lil Nouns, Unouns, Nouns Amigos, and more via our SoapBox Program.
While we do maintain that the SoapBox program was impactful, and was certainly appreciated in many corners of the nouniverse, it also demanded a lot of labor to maintain in terms of scheduling, administration, social media messaging, hosting and coordination. As we started to receive feedback from Nouns DAO members that they did not feel SoapBox should be a primary focus for TNS, we made the difficult decision to mostly wind it down.
So as not to leave our communities in the lurch, we did the social media equivalent of making SoapBox "open source": We created a new X account called TNS OpenMic, where any nounsfolk can apply to host a show about any nounish community or topic of their choosing. We will still amplify where possible, but without the previous commitment of in-house scheduling, messaging, hosting, etc. Our vision for OpenMic is that it can act as a Public Access Channel for Nouns, where anyone can show up and spin up a Space with a built-in audience to iterate and try things out, but without the high administrative burden on TNS.
As a result of these and other changes to our day-to-day operations, we were able to stretch our previous mandate from 6 months to 9 months, and are presenting today a proposal that is almost 60% leaner than previoius asks.
5) Promising Progress on Self-Funding & Alternative Funding Sources
One of our primary goals in Season 2 was to explore alternate sources of funding to become more self-sufficient as an organization, and we have explored this priority from three main angles: 1) Sponsorship collaborations, 2) Grants from other sources, and 3) Crypto Native revenue generation.
On item 1, we were able to negotiate 4 collaborations with values-aligned organizations plus a one-off video commission, for a total ETH value of 5.5 ETH. Thank you to Dawn Wallet, Gnars DAO and OnChainMonkey for being open to these collaborations so far. We are currently in discussions with various other organizations and protocols as well for future month-long content sponsorship opportunities.
Secondly, we were extremely grateful to be awarded a Gitcoin Public Goods grant of 2.5 ETH for outstanding work in Web 3 Education and Onboarding, and a 5 ETH grant from Builder DAO to seed the imminently launching Yellow Collective treasury with funds to be used for nounish art contests and content commissions.
And finally, we have brought in a total of 9.14 ETH YTD from our NOMO Nouns Daily Edition mints over the course of Season 2. We have also been iterating and evolving the NOMO collection and experience to make it more accessible for our audience. This summer, we migrated the collection to the Optimism L2 to solve the problem of a $7 daily mint that was costing $50 in gas to mint. Recently, we also made the decision to lower the mint cost from ~$7 to ~$1 to again encourage more broad participation from our community on a daily basis.
With these four sources combined, we have so far raised 22.14 ETH in outside revenue and grants, and we hope to double this amount in Season 3.
One way that we will attempt to do that is with the launch of The Yellow Collective, a new TNS onchain club that will be deployed this month as a daily nounish auction on the BASE L2 using Nouns Builder.
6) Nouns on the OP Stack
We noticed an interesting problem when talking to our community: Many wanted to "Enjoy Ethereum", but they were fed up with paying high gas fees on mainnet to do so. We decided to make it part of our mandate to teach our 50,000+ followers across socials about the benefits of using OP Stack L2 chains, and show them exactly how to do it.
First, we migrated our daily edition collection "NOMO Nouns" from mainnet to OP, and produced some helpful tutorials on how to bridge ETH. Next, we started minting our Zero Rights Reserved podcasts as FREE mint collectibles on Zora L2 (shout out Jacob for helping us with this rollout.)
Finally, we are in the midst of launching a "DAO" (onchain club) on BASE L2 using Nouns Builder this month, called The Yellow Collective. This Collective will be primarily focused on empowering artists and creatives through art contests and commissions, with collection art created by our community for our community. Check out the results of our Prop House Round for the first 50 heads here, and learn more about our plans for The Yellow Collective, and the BASE-deployed "Collective Nouns" daily auctions in our official announcement thread here.
This diagram may also help to illustrate our three-pronged strategy for educating the Nouns community about the OP Stack, and the importance of Ethereum L2s:
One of our core ideals as an organization is to help create a safe and accessible place for people from all over the world to be able to Enjoy Nouns, and we are excited to leverage these L2 initiatives to do exactly that.
And on top of that, we're also just very excited for these Collective Nouns auctions to start... just look at these community-drawn traits!
Our Guiding Goals for Season 3:
- Remain consistent with our daily Twitter/X spaces and continue our current upward trajectory of followers and engagement on that platform, which would bring us to more than 14,000 followers, and a 6-month total of 1 million+ content impressions.
- Grow and improve both the podcast and our YouTube channel content (which is already the second-largest channel in the nouniverse with 450 subscribers and also the fastest-growing channel with 150% subscriber growth this year.) We are targeting a similar rate of growth to hit our goal of 1000 Subscribers. As a baseline, we plan to produce and distribute at least 30 high quality pieces of video content in Season 3.
- Make Zero Rights Reserved our co-flagship production alongside Noun O' Clock LIVE, leaning into the current momentum. (We have already recorded 1 month of future episodes with exciting guests like Vinnie Hager and the founders of Unlonely, still to air.)
- Allocate more time and resources on making and using short clips from past and future ZEROPOD episodes for use on TikTok, Instagram and YT shorts (which are great content in and of themselves and also great drivers of listeners and subscribers back to the podcast.)
- Double the total amount of funding from TNS initiatives and outside sources to at least 40 ETH.
- Grow The Yellow Collective into the premiere nounish DAO (onchain club) on BASE as an accessible way for fans to discover nouns with the benefits of L2.
- Continue our mission of discovering and empowering nounish artists and creatives with the proceeds from daily auctions, running at least 20 contests for artists and creatives.
- Update the Nouns community at minimum every 60 days with an onchain post on Propdates.wtf.
Budget and Requested Funding
We are requesting 130 ETH (~6 Nouns' worth at current FMV) for 6 months of operations and our expected operational budgeting can be broken down as follows:
-Art Contest Prizes Administration: 2 ETH/mo
-Social Accounts Management: 3 ETH/mo
-Spaces Hosting (NOC + All Others, Approx 50/month): 4.5 ETH/mo
-Podcast organization, interviews, editing, production, distribution, etc: 4.5ETH/mo
-Other Video Content Production and Distribution (This Week in Nouns, educational content, nouns project highlights, etc.): 3 ETH/mo
-Short content creation and distribution for TikTok, instagram, YT reels, etc.: 1.5 ETH/mo
-General Administration (Event Scheduling, Interview Scheduling, Prize Distribution, etc): 3 ETH/mo
Total expected budget operational cost per month: 21.5 ETH = 130 ETH Total
Core Team:
-Toady Hawk: Project management, strategy, Spaces hosting, podcast hosting, video ideation, production, editing & distribution, social media management, administration.
-Robotfishgirl: Spaces hosting, discord moderation, strategy
-JackWyldes: Video ideation, production, hosting, editing.
-Benbodhi: Prize distribution, discord admin, strategy.
-Xargs: Discord admin, general administration, scheduling, international outreach
-Santhosh: Scheduling, video editing, short video editing
-Joshua Fisher: Art Contest Coordination and administration
-Symbiotech: Social media management, Discord moderation, NOMO community
Other Contributors: Cardno, BrettDrawsStuff, Nikki, JP, Davin, SuperTightWoody, Macki, Satori.
Core Team will collaborate to allocate funds to team members based on their contributions to the weekly operations tasks budgets outlined above.
Trusted 3/6 Multisig Members:
Robotfishgirl
Benbodhi
SupertightWoody
Maty.eth
Toady Hawk
Noun 142
We would like to thank Nouns for all of the opportunity and trust you have given TNS over the past 18 months, and we ask for your continued support here as we set out to do more with less and make an increasingly positive and tangible impact on the Nouniverse over the next 6 months.
If you have any questions for us about the Proposal, please don't hesitate to pose a question here onchain, DM or post on X/Twitter or Farcaster @thenounsquare, or drop in our TNS Discord.
LFG! ⌐◨-◨
