In November of 2023, The Noun Square was given a renewed mandate by the DAO to continue creating impact via community-building and onchain media creation for 6 months. Through careful treasury management as well as securing additional outside revenue and funding sources, we have been able to extend that mandate by almost 200%, to 10 months.
Launched and incubated The Yellow Collective, a vibrant and active fork of Nouns on Base that has allowed us to independently fund ALL of our art contests & initiatives for creatives that were previously funded by Nouns in past seasons, while also onboarding an entirely new population of fans to Nouns.
Led the way by shifting our primary content distribution focus away from X & YouTube and instead towards Farcaster, Zora, TavernFM and other onchain media platforms.
Doubled down on the production of thoughtful, entertaining video content and distributing it across YouTube, X, TikTok, Spotify, Warpcast and Zora.
Continued to grow and refine The Zero Rights Reserved Podcast (ZEROPOD.XYZ) brand, celebrating one full year of CC0 video podcasts featuring 29 high quality guests from both inside of nouns (Seneca, Noun 40, Jesse Pollak, Jacob, Dan Romero, Supriyo, Amir Bandeali, Will Papper) as well as outside (Mike Demarais, Vinnie Hager, winny.eth and more.)
Remained a consistent cultural touchpoint for the Nouns community, celebrating more than 2 full years of hosting The Noun O' Clock LIVE show every single day without a miss. (In fact, next week we will host our 800th episode in a row!)
During Noun O' Clock, we have also helped to curate many aesthetic nouns via FOMONOUNS, as well as Nouns for specific holidays, and more than 30 noun heads requested by 20+ people, most of whom would purchase these Nouns as a result. In combination with people who were onboarded directly to Nouns by TNS/Yellow, minting Nouns by request has** contributed towards more than 200 ETH worth of Nouns purchases at auction this year alone. **Here is a breadown of that data by request:
Acted as a community connection, media partner and ambassador for other nounish builders and projects such as Nouns Esports, Nouns Movie, Nouns Deli, Rounds.wtf, Nounish Boardgame, Ledger x PlayDNA, Nouns DAO Japan and more.
Made significant strides towards self-sustainability, raising over $200,000 USDC via auctions, grants and mint revenue for The Yellow Collective (earmarked specifically to support onchain artists and creators) plus an additional $115,000 in outside grants, mint revenue and partnerships for The Noun Square's operations.
We are asking Nouns here for 89 ETH in funding to continue these important initiatives for the next 6 months, with an intentional focus on continuing to refine and grow our video production output, stoking the fires of the burgeoning Yellow community, and acting as a leader in our community in the category of project self-sustainability. To that end, our goal is to extend this next term with outside revenue (as we have done every time so far) and we plan to turn 6 months of runway into 12 months of Nounish impact.
NB: After receiving feedback during candidate stage, we have lowered our overall ask by 8%, and it now represents a 30% decrease from our previous proposal in absolute terms. If we consider the cost per month to Nouns over our 12 month term goal, it's actually almost 50% less than our previous ask. We take our continued progress towards sustainability very seriously.
This proposal will now briefly touch on each of the above-listed achievements, and then lay out our plan and strategy for new growth and experimentation over the next 6 months.
In January of this year, 9+ months of planning culminated with the launch of The Yellow Collective; a Nouns Builder-enabled fork of nouns on Base, with the goal of leveraging the vibrant community of artists we had grown over the previous 2 years at The Noun Square into a self-sustaining flywheel that would fund onchain creators and onboard them to the nouns ecosystem.
Eight months later, Yellow stands apart as one of the most active and vibrant nounish communities onchain, and we have celebrated the following successes so far this year:
We have raised over 40 ETH from daily auction proceeds on yellowcollective.xyz.
We have raised a further 60 ETH from other sources (20 ETH from outside grants, 10 ETH from merchandise and other and revenue, and 30 ETH from minting revenue so far this year.)
We have paid out 50 ETH in art contests, commissions and mint revenue sharing with artists and creators + more than 1 ETH in mint-split revenue back to Nouns via the treasury's proxy addresses on Base and Zora.
We've grown our community organically to 163 holders, 80% of whom (131) are all in a very active group chat on Warpcast.
For many (maybe even most) of our holders, a Yellow Collective Noun was their first introduction to Nouns, and some like Yes2Crypto have gone on to join Nouns as well.
We have successfully collaborated with many onchain communities such as $HIGHER, $DEGEN, $BUILD, $IMAGINE, $NOGS, Verbs, Basepaint and Moshicam on Art Contests and other initiatives.
We have run over a dozen art contests using Uplink and Rounds.wtf and have distributed $50,000 worth of ETH, DEGEN, HIGHER and other tokens to artists and creators so far this year via Rounds alone.
We have been recognized by Jesse Pollak and the Base team as one of the most impactful teams building in their ecosystem.
We have achieved and surpassed our primary goal of generating enough revenue so that our ongoing art contests and creator onboarding initiatives could be completely self-funded.
Artists we have collaborated with have told us that Yellow was the community that first piqued their interest in Nouns and led them to explore our ecosystem more.
One of our core directives at Yellow has been to host frequent Art Contests to flood our channels with fun and nounish UGC. We have hosted 15 such contests so far this year, originally on Uplink.wtf and later leveraging Rounds.wtf.
As you can see, the results have been incredible.
A huge thank you to Seneca and the Rounds team for making it painfully easy for communities like ours to run contests that both leverage and broaden our social graph at the same time.
Many in Nouns have expressed a desire to see creators and builders experiment more with minting content onchain and pushing nounish minting culture forward generally. We took this to heart, and over the past 10 months, we have focused our efforts on maximum experimentation with onchain distribution for both Yellow art drops and various pieces of TNS video content.
The results speak for themselves:
As you can see in the chart above, we have been able to drive over 51,000 unique mints on our onchain content this year, representing 38,000 unique wallets and over $90,000 in minting revenue.
We have accomplished this by building a strong community on Farcaster and releasing both collaborative art drops and video content there in an onchain-first way with Boosted Zora minting frames, and also by leaning into the amplification and support of Nouns-peripheral ecosystems and communities like Base, Zora, Optimism, Higher, Degen, and others.
We have also been able to grow our Zora profile to 8,800 Followers, and the /yellow channel to 19,500 followers, which have both helped with distribution of our mintable content. You can check out everything we have released onchain this year on our Zora Profile.
We believe that these onchain metrics are the most important indicators that we are reaching our intended audience while at the same time helping to bring us closer to a more self-sustaining media distribution model.
We recently celebrated the one year anniversary of our TNS-produced Zero Rights Reserved Podcast (ZEROPOD.XYZ) on July 28, during which time we have hosted 29 incredible guests talking about different perspectives on the theme "Enjoying Ethereum", from a thoroughly nounish perspective. These have included many high profile guests such as Luca Netz, Seneca, Noun 40, Jack Butcher, Jesse Pollak, Vinnie Hager and many more.
We released this commemorative short called "Thank You For Having Us" to celebrate 1 Year of ZEROPOD.
ZEROPOD episodes (and clips from them) have been released both via traditional web 2 distribution platforms (YouTube, Spotify, X) and onchain distribution (Zora, Warpcast), with an intentional focus on the latter.
On Spotify, episodes have received an average of 60 listens each, while on YouTube that number is about 150 Listens per episode. These together represent a combined nearly 8000 full listens/views over the first year, which is quite a solid base for a podcast in a niche category.
Meanwhile, the onchain versions of ZEROPOD have been minted by collectors on Zora more than 4000 times, and our commemorative "Thanks for Having Us" mint linked above also received 2300 mints in its own right.
The individual feedback we have received from listeners and watchers of the podcast have been really positive, with 2 guests on separate occasions calling it "the best podcast I've been on" and listeners saying they never miss an episode, and that certain episodes really helped them to better understand Nouns:
In addition to ZEROPOD, we have also put a special focus this year on producing short and medium-length educational videos, and in similar fashion to ZEROPOD, on distributing them via both traditional and onchain channels.
With JackWyldes (Seth) at the helm, our video content team has been been getting great results with a variety of content, some with a narrow Nouns focus, and others with an educational focus on Nouns-adjacent onchain topics like Base, Farcaster and the Superchain.
Our Nouns Round Up series, which aims to summarize everything that happened in the Nouniverse each month in one 5 minute clip, has been a crowd favorite. We have received thousands of impressions on this Series across X, YouTube, Spotify and Warpcast, and an average of 100 mints per episode of the onchain versions on Zora. Additionally, community members have frequently thanked us for keeping them up to date, while other nounish builders have expressed appreciation for having their efforts highlighted and amplified.
With all of our video content combined, we recently surpassed the milestone of over 30,000 views on our YouTube:
We have also been experimenting with creating custom video pieces highlighting standout nounish builders, a niche that had been left vacant after Nounish doubled down on their promising IG content. Check out "Better Between Bread", our 5 minute spot on 87Bones & Nouns Deli, as well as our recent Spotlight on Seneca and Rounds.
Our video content has also extended to other corners of the onchain universe. For example, here is a series called Farcaster 101 that was quite popular on Warpcast. And here is a video detailing Optimism's "We Heart the Art" contest that was shared broadly by the OP Team. Jack also created a short film called Welcome to Onchain Summer that was shared by the Base team and minted 12,000 times so far! Carlos and Toady have been hosting a "Based Builders" Show as well, first on X (audio) and later on YouTube Live video.
We see this as an obvious strategy, because there is such a dearth of quality, easy-to-digest content on some of these topics, which presents many opportunities for us to represent both nouns and nounish first principles like CC0 and education in the broader onchain space.
We are positioning ourselves as a trustworthy producer of open source, entertaining & educational content about onchain topics, while also walking the walk by pushing and experimenting with onchain distribution for these same videos.
In addition to medium and longer form educational content, we are also committing time and resources to clipping relevant shorts from our longer form videos and podcasts too, which are then shared across socials such as YouTube Shorts, TikTok, instagram, X and Warpcast. Many of these shorts are outperforming the long form content they are clipped from in terms of both views and impressions.
As a bonus, because our content is all CC0, other accounts like Leo Clarke's "Nouns News" have been clipping shorts from our videos as well, which we have been able to repurpose and re-share.
In June, we celebrated the 2 Year anniversary of The Noun O' Clock LIVE Show, and next week while this proposal is active, we will also be celebrating our 800th daily episode in a row, without missing a single day.
The Noun Square team has always worked together to make sure we are consistently there to celebrate NOC as a "moment of celebration for the internet" (h/t 4156) and a daily cultural touchpoint for the Nouns community.
Earlier this year, we made a bold decision to move our show from X Spaces, where it had been for more than a year, over to Brennen's new onchain-enabled and Farcaster-integrated hangout client Tavern FM. We knew that we risked losing some of our usual audience because of the migration, but wanted to stay true to our goals of being as onchain as possible and wanted to be able leverage the growth we were seeing on Farcaster as a result of The Yellow Collective, while also mitigating any risk of deplatforming. You can see and listen back to all our Tavern Spaces on our profile here.
Now, 8 months later, Tavern is emerging as the early frontrunner in the Farcaster-voice space, with other prominent communities and content creators like Late Night Crew and @ted now hosting daily and weekly shows there. We are excited to conitue to grow NOCL alongside Tavern as a platform in the coming months!
In addition to keeping the community informed about everything happening in the Nouniverse, and adjacent ecosystems like Farcaster, Base and the Superchain, we have also kept the energy up around minting fun and meaningful Nouns via FOMONOUNS.
Some of the handsomest Nouns we've helped to mint this year.
Of course, as in the past, we have been able to mint some fine-looking specimens, and some special heads for special occasions, and First-Ofs for the newly added traits, but more important than that is how we have been able to use NOC and FOMO as an opportunity to help find people their Forever Nouns.
Just this year, we have already helped to mint Nouns by request or curation for at least twenty nouners, including Carlos Melgar, The Bower, Val Taylor, NounsMX, $NOGS, Carlos Juar, Sam S, Peterpandam, Yes2Crypto (x5!), Humpty, The Park, Nounspacetom, Mono, 87Bones, TheWarDoctor, PatYiu + our very own Benbodhi, Robotfishgirl and Brett.
Some of the above list were also expressly onboarded to Nouns more generally by TNS and Yellow, like Carlos:
**Our efforts have helped to impact more than 200 ETH in Nouns purchased this year between direct onboarding, community support efforts and FOMO minting. **Here again is a chart breaking down these numbers YTD:
Conclusion: TNS is making real, tangible impact in many ways with this one little daily ritual.
As a constant active and energetic force in the Nouniverse, we are often approached by other funded Nounish builders and projects to help amplify their work or collaborate in other ways, and we are always more than happy to do so.
Some examples of this kind of DAO and community support:
Increasing the sustainability of our project has been top of mind for us for more than a year, and we have made more efforts and inroads on this front than almost any other funded group.
Last time we put up a proposal, we reported that we had self-raised 22.14 ETH in total (just under $45K USD at that time) and we set ourselves an audacious goal to double that amount in revenues, sponsorships, and outside grants in the subsequent six months.
This one is for Jarmen, he's a visual learner.
Part of those funds have allowed us to nearly double the length of our current mandate from the DAO, and part belong to The Yellow Collective, but which is well-equipped now to continue funding and empowering artists without needing further funding from Nouns.
Here is the list of the different initiatives and strategies we have employed this year to meet and exceed our sustainability objectives:
We are proud to have lead by example in this area so far, and we plan to continue to aggressively pursue several outside revenue sources in our upcoming Season. We have already achieved our internal goal of making the "Art Contest and Artist Onboarding" portion of our mandate fully sustainable and spun out as its own fledgling flywheel in The Yellow Collective. Our hope now is to continue pushing towards further sustainability for our own TNS operations as well.
We are very excited about the future of The Noun Square, ZEROPOD and The Yellow Collective. Here are some of our top level goals for the next six months:
-Art Contest Prizes and Administration: Previously 4 ETH/mo, now $0 (Fully sustained by Yellow Collective revenue)
TNS Operations: -Social Accounts Management (X, Warpcast): 1.5 ETH/mo -Spaces/Tavern Hosting (Approx 40/month): 2 ETH/mo -ZEROPOD organization, interviews, editing, production, distribution, etc: 3 ETH/mo -Other Video Content Production and Distribution (Nouns Round Up, educational content, nouns project highlights, etc.): 2 ETH/mo -Short content creation and distribution for TikTok, instagram, YT reels, etc.: 1.5 ETH/mo -Light Content Promotion on X, YT, Zora: 1 ETH -BD work for sponsorships and grants: 1 ETH -General Administration (Event Scheduling, Interview Scheduling, Prize Distribution, Yellow Collective administration, and miscellaneous): 2.83 ETH/mo
Total Per Month: 14.83 ETH
**Total Proposal Ask: 89 ETH **(Reduced by 7% from Candidate Proposal)
TNS and Yellow are lead by a core team who eat, sleep and breathe nouns. In fact, four of us have purchased Nouns of our own.
We are:
-Toady Hawk: Project management, strategy, spaces hosting, podcast hosting, video ideation & production, editing & distribution, social media management, administration, BD. -Benbodhi: Funds and prizes distribution, website design & administration, discord admin, strategy. -Robotfishgirl: Spaces/Tavern hosting, discord moderation, strategy. -JackWyldes: Video ideation, production, hosting, editing. -Santhosh: Scheduling, video editing, short video editing. -Symbiotech: Social media management, Discord moderation. -BrettDrawsStuff: Spaces/Tavern cohosting, Yellow community.
Occasional Contributors: Carlos Melgar, ProfWerder, SuperTightWoody, Xargs, Kyrowolf
Core Team will collaborate to allocate funds to team members based on their contributions to the monthly operations budgets outlined above.
TNS operates a multi-chain SAFE at 0x73c19e2A309400724689103A5BA483511C09633e, which is a 3/6 multisig with the following trusted signers: Toady Hawk, Benbodhi, Robotfishgirl, Symbiotech, SuperTightWoody & Prof Werder.
A sincere Thank you to everyone who made it this far. We know governance is hard work and we appreciate your attention and your time.
We believe that we are making a meaningful impact for nouns every single day with our community-building, content creation and collaborative energy, while pushing the boundaries of both onchain minting distribution and project sustainability.
We hope the DAO agrees! ⌐◨-◨
I fw the vision, Yellow feels like Nouns but upgraded for the modern Base/Farcaster/Zora era - and they have a track record of exceeding expectations. Just on gut feeling the budget does seem kinda high for the various expenses listed but I trust the process.
Thanks all for the support and feedback! Excited to keep going every single day! ⌐🄽°🄲
Truly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from the community here over the past week. Thank you to each and everyone who took the time to vote and share feedback.
Back to work! 🫡 ⌐◨-◨
For: 16 | Against: 2 | Abstain: 0
+for — @carlosjmelgar
+against — @bixbite
+for — @brettdrawsstuff
+for — @loudman.eth
+for — @badhobbit
+for /yellow collective is such a massive boost for artists and builders. — @pramadan.eth
+for In a decentralized environment there are few staples--few places you can go day after day, week after week as a reliable place to keep up and learn. The Noun Square & The Yellow Collective are that for Nouns. First rate, nounish folks that are reliable, helpful, and fun. We need a place we know we can go for all things Nouns. This is the place. — @bradq
+for Without this community there would be no basement5k. — @basement5k.eth
+for — @netnose
+for Okay contentious take here but hear me out, NounsDAO would more or less fade into irrelevancy or would not have this impactful of an online/onchain presence without TNS, point blank period. — @poopiepie
+for I’m part of the team so maybe I shouldnt vote here but ..TNS is dedicated to growing nouns through content,community, and kindness (wish that started with c). That might sound cheesy but having a group to welcome and encourage people who are noun curious is important. There are so many examples of people using TNS & Yellow as the gateway to noundom. Also we make cool videos 😉 — @jackwyldes
Reply to @poopiepie: We can put this to the test. +against — @indexcard.eth
+for — @symbiotech.eth
+for — @lunari
+for I LOVE THIS TEAM SO MUCH and I love the things they do, easily one of the most important parts of my onboarding and understanding of web3 + nouns — @jesscas
+for +for +for +for +for +for +for +for +for +for +for +for — @crpdaddy.eth
+for — @datadanne.eth
+for — @moctezuma3ro
The nouniverse has voted through $NOGS ⌐◨-◨
FOR: 9 AGAINST: 2
31680 $NOGS have been shared among the participants.
A little flashback of how I first learned about Nouns is from the TNS Art contest. Always interested to join every contest held by TNS. Whether we realize it or not, this team has brought many people to know Nouns quickly. Although “sustainable” is still a problem for this media proliferation. But they have proven that they can survive for several months by making various new breakthroughs such as Yellow Collective etc. I support Toady and the TNS team!!!
on behalf of /nounsfe: For: 4 | Against: 0 | Abstain: 0
lunari: TNS & The Yellow Collective have brought me some of the most genuine fun I've ever had onchain, and has taught my friend's and i the most about Nouns. (And their friend's friends). I LUV U ROBOTFISHGIRL I LUV U TNS & YELLOW TEAM; imo it would be very silly if this did not pass ! This is the perfect place to point people when they want to explore Nouns, but don't know exactly where to start. (also can we talk about how GORGEOUS so many nouns are because of the awesome team being at the daily auction EVERY SINGLE DAY.
tori: for, without realizing it this is the group that had gotten me introduced to more of the onchain stuff. Tavern was the first place i explored because of the Noun o Clock shows. This proposal shows great scheduling on what the plan is for their projects all with the idea of building nouns. It doesnt feel like a proposal that is trying to slap nouns on something. This group i feel like plays a huge role in getting people who have never heard of nouns involved within the community
jess: FOR!!! TNS is largely responsible for onboarding me to web3, and have such a fun team and community that is extremely welcome to all of those interested. Their initiatives and output are made with love, and support and grow the nouns community. Super nounish and I can't wait to see what they do next!
Big fan of Toady and the things he's done for this ecosystem. One of the first names I think of pushing things constantly. Happy to support this.
reiterating what I said before, this team is a hugely influential force in the nouns ecosystem. they are consistently driving value back to nouns. will be keeping a close eye on them to learn how they become self sustaining so we can borrow the model for CryptoSapiens.
Good builders, obviously making it work, let's see what they can do next
I love nouns and there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about how I can help people get to know what is going on here. I think we’ve created a foundation for something that can really educate many more people, not just about nouns, but the entire onchain world and why it’s important to the evolution of humanity.
It’s been a real pleasure working with the many people that have helped TNS become what it is. Yellow and ZeroPod are both the offspring of TNS being supported by the DAO to share nouns with the world and I’m excited to continue to contribute to the growth that led us here. I truly believe there are more growth stages ahead.
It’s hard to find people that are as dedicated and consistent as we have over the years and it’s heartwarming to read the feedback from so many people that solidifies this sentiment.
nounish af ⌐◨-◨ ⌐ⓝ°ⓒ ⌐⧄-⧄ ⌐🟨-🟨 ⌐◧-◧ ⌐🄲-🄲-🄾
Fans of both Zero Pod & Jack, potentially allocated larger portion of this funding to distribution.
Be good to see more exploration of NOC streamed through multiple apps which was executed well on 3rd Birthday.
⌐◨-◨
the nouns square are some of the most legit builders and onboarders. more!
The Nouncil has spoken.
We discuss all Nouns proposals every week in our Discord https://discord.gg/fdjJpMeV6K. The calls are public and all are welcome!
You can find a link to previous call recordings in our Discord "links" channel.
Nouncil has decided in favor of this proposal, with 38 votes for, 6 against, and 5 abstentions. Supporters emphasized the valuable role The Noun Square (TNS) and The Yellow Collective play in connecting nounish communities, supporting artists, and enhancing collaboration. The concept of "Community as a Service" was highlighted as essential for maintaining engagement and growth within the Nouns ecosystem. Despite some opposition, the majority see the continued efforts of TNS and The Yellow Collective as key to bringing new builders and bidders into the community.
FOR - 38 VOTES
jackwyldes | "absolutely FOR - TNS and Yellow are incredible landing zones for those curious about Nouns. TNS has been a bridge between nounish communities, artists, and builders."
profwerder | "Community as a Service is an underrated value of TNS. Having a team dedicated to being a touchpoint for the community is vital. Thanks for all the work over the past two+ years."
0xdariush0 | "TNS is home to me, and they are growing beautifully, let's keep it growing."
mamaxargs | "LFG!"
yung_algorithm | "kudos to the team."
cheffo | "Paint it Yellow!"
sqx.pcc | "You cant always get what you want. But if you try sometimes ... you get what you need!"
AGAINST - 6 VOTES
ABSTAINS - 5 VOTES
Without TNS community, a lot of new members would have never found Nouns. They did well orienting towards using onchain media + farcaster and yellow’s success in finding some revenue is evident. If the goal to run sustainably for a year is achieved by subsidized outside grants, it’s a step in right direction.
A great team delivering value every single day + has proven to generate revenue is an easy yes. Thanks, Yellow Collective, for all the work you do ⌐◨-◨
Appreciate the work from TNS and The Yellow Collective, and their successful efforts to raise outside funding (hope to see this continue to grow).
Toady brought us into Nouns, and it’s unlikely we would have connected without TNS.
I would love to have a noun to vote as a hell yeah vibe here. I onboarded lot of folks through TNS.
Anyway hell Yeah on this!
PlayDNA is FOR. See below for our collective vote with reason (TheBower, JP, FabValle, joaoborges):
We are all individually fans of TNS, Yellow, and the team. They have been a backbone of the community, not only with their ongoing commitment to proliferating the Nouns brand and culture, but also by constantly innovating within the space. We also highly value the tangible progress they achieved in sustainability. Let’s keep it going!
nom nom tns & yellow collective
Over 800 shows in a row and 100X that many laughs and fun times. This team constantly experiments and keeps Nouns relevant in any conversations concerning new tech PLUS they are a huge driver of onboarding and developing some of our most passionate and beloved artists in the community.
go yellow!
Incredible work! I’ll take this opportunity to engage in a web3 doubles routine with Toady Hawk. Bucky Lasek will understand. Keep ripping Toady and team!
I will repeat, that Yellow Collective and Nouns Town Square crew is literally what keeps the heart beat and pulse of nouns alive everyday. Constant contributions and energy every single fucking day. We can't let this die!
yes
hard to say where we would be without the square
I will repeat, that Yellow Collective and Nouns Town Square crew is literally what keeps the heart beat and pulse of nouns alive everyday. Constant contributions and energy every single fucking day. We can't let this die!
Community as a Service is underrated here. TNS keeps proliferating externallly and internally through all the ups & downs; forks & turmoil; bull & bear. Appreciate the consistency and continued dedication.
Appreciate the work from TNS and The Yellow Collective, and their successful efforts to raise outside funding (hope to see this continue to grow).
Toady brought us into Nouns, and it’s unlikely we would have connected without TNS.
The Cares team greatly loves and appreciates TNS and the Yellow collective and we would only be a part of Nouns with Toady and Yellows early support and guidance. Toady has been a constant presence and was instrumental in our onboarding into Nouns and the broader community.
Yellow is doing remarkable work and deserves the support needed to continue on its path of quality and success.
hard to say where we would be without the square
⌐◨-◨
https://www.lilnouns.wtf/vote/nounsdao/619/votes
FOR 27 VOTES
AGAINST 257 VOTES
ABSTAIN 0 VOTES
I thought the goal was to fund projects until they become self sustainable..... This proposal has clearly shown it can generate revenue, $313k is not an easy feat, so at what point does this project continue to live on without DAO funding? Given the current state of the treasury and this proposal being 9% of our yearly inflow, I feel it is a large expense for something that has proved it can generate revenue without the DAO...... if this was a smaller proposal to fund Zero Pod & the videos Jack creates I'd love to support it, but given TNS shift from Twitter to Tavern and with an average audience of 10 (including hosts) I think the current budget is very hard to justify. Even looking at the stats of people that play back the episodes, it's a handful. TNS used to be the place where people would come to pitch proposals, guests were scheduled to come on, there would be 25+ people playing FOMO etc, but times have changed and swaps have taken over.... the fact that Prof bought a Noun & swapped for a flamingo vs having it minted through FOMO (because she waited 2 months and one didn't pop up), shows that FOMO no longer serves the purpose as it had in the past. I know this is an unfavorable opinion and I'm okay with that, but at some point we have to start being more critical of our spending if we want to sustain the DAO.
I had some similar thoughts re: lower viewership on ZEROPOD + tavern. My biggest concern is that as a group, we tend to produce (products/media/code) that is only interesting to ourselves. One of the most inspiring things about FWB and particularly fest is that fest produces cultural artifacts that are interesting even if you have no association to or even knowledge of what FWB is. In order for things like TNS to scale outside of nouns, I think they need to start producing media that would be interesting to someone with no knowledge of nouns.
I brought my concerns to Toady, and he explained to me that CC0 and onchain media are ultimately what ZEROPOD is about. ZEROPOD literally meaning "Zero Rights Reserved Podcast". Toady spoke to their goals of having more of an focus on growing within the cc0 space, and being a voice for cc0 as a whole instead of just nouns. I love this goal and think it could be a strong path to growing TNS / ZEROPOD to a broader audience and crediting nouns as curator of not just self-referential media but of genuinely useful and educational content that is pushing the entire space forward.
I believe this bundle makes it too hard to vote for things on their own merit.
For e.g. would prefer noun o'clock to have more focus, with clear strategy about how you are leveraging this to drive attention to the DAO. I think if we were to draw NOCL on a graph since 800 days ago it would be pretty clearly trending down, not gaining traction - and with all the other stuff going on within this proposal, it now feels like an afterthought, which is a shame imo.
The Jack Wyldes, Zero Pod stuff seems totally different to the above and this graph would likely be trending the other way, so therein lies the issue for me with having to blanket vote for everything here. Imo there would be more success / the outcomes would ultimately be better if each part were it's own prop requesting the resources required. Good luck anyway and looking forward to following along.
I thought the goal was to fund projects until they become self sustainable..... This proposal has clearly shown it can generate revenue, $313k is not an easy feat, so at what point does this project continue to live on without DAO funding? Given the current state of the treasury and this proposal being 9% of our yearly inflow, I feel it is a large expense for something that has proved it can generate revenue without the DAO...... if this was a smaller proposal to fund Zero Pod & the videos Jack creates I'd love to support it, but given TNS shift from Twitter to Tavern and with an average audience of 10 (including hosts) I think the current budget is very hard to justify. Even looking at the stats of people that play back the episodes, it's a handful. TNS used to be the place where people would come to pitch proposals, guests were scheduled to come on, there would be 25+ people playing FOMO etc, but times have changed and swaps have taken over.... the fact that Prof bought a Noun & swapped for a flamingo vs having it minted through FOMO (because she waited 2 months and one didn't pop up), shows that FOMO no longer serves the purpose as it had in the past. I know this is an unfavorable opinion and I'm okay with that, but at some point we have to start being more critical of our spending if we want to sustain the DAO.
I would love to vote for it, but I find it highly improbable that the project/team can create a sustainable effort while team compensation is so high. I'm unsure if people need to be compensated like doctors and lawyers to run podcasts and Twitter spaces, and manage a Dao that operates onchain. Thanks for the work you do and the cultivating the art and grassroots..
Don't sleep on TNS noun fam. Toady and the TNS crew are severely underrated. Between the founders and the collective members, they have made crypto more accessible and fun while also setting a precedent on-chain. Like many others, I was on boarded to this new space thanks to the yellow crew. I'm excited to watch the next chapter unfold ⌐◨-◨
love TNS and Yellow. my first real exposure to the nouniverse, and i'm sure i'm not the only one. doing big good nounish things
Community as a Service is underrated here. TNS keeps proliferating externallly and internally through all the ups & downs; forks & turmoil; bull & bear. Appreciate the consistency and continued dedication.
I've observed a strong focus on cultivating the "yes, and" mindset throughout the hive-mind, which I like to think has contributed significantly to this team's successes. All accelerated through the daily grind, hustle and relentless optimism.
Unfortunately I don't get to intentionally consume all of their content, but seeing it on my feed is always a good pulse check.
epic propdate, yellow is an inspiration. keep up the great work fam 💛 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Q4s_ZdvAQ
yellow is my fav color (next to purple)
upward and onward friends 🚀🟡
epic propdate, yellow is an inspiration. keep up the great work fam 💛 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Q4s_ZdvAQ
TNS and Yellow Collective were one of the main reasons I came onchain and is 100% responsible for introducing me to nouns and everything nounish.
I will repeat, that Yellow Collective and Nouns Town Square crew is literally what keeps the heart beat and pulse of nouns alive everyday. Constant contributions and energy every single fucking day. We can't let this die!
TNS inspired me to join Nouns as a holder and builder. I would not have purchased a noun without the fomo created by this team. I spent many months getting Nouns pilled at Noun o'Clock. Their passion for Nouns is contagious. Toady is very proactive about reaching out to industry leaders, this helps increase visibility for the DAO, attracting more talented builders and aligned bidders. The willingness to support other Nounish projects is a huge service to the DAO. This prop ticks all the boxes for me.
I will repeat, that Yellow Collective and Nouns Town Square crew is literally what keeps the heart beat and pulse of nouns alive everyday. Constant contributions and energy every single fucking day. We can't let this die!
In November of 2023, The Noun Square was given a renewed mandate by the DAO to continue creating impact via community-building and onchain media creation for 6 months. Through careful treasury management as well as securing additional outside revenue and funding sources, we have been able to extend that mandate by almost 200%, to 10 months.
Launched and incubated The Yellow Collective, a vibrant and active fork of Nouns on Base that has allowed us to independently fund ALL of our art contests & initiatives for creatives that were previously funded by Nouns in past seasons, while also onboarding an entirely new population of fans to Nouns.
Led the way by shifting our primary content distribution focus away from X & YouTube and instead towards Farcaster, Zora, TavernFM and other onchain media platforms.
Doubled down on the production of thoughtful, entertaining video content and distributing it across YouTube, X, TikTok, Spotify, Warpcast and Zora.
Continued to grow and refine The Zero Rights Reserved Podcast (ZEROPOD.XYZ) brand, celebrating one full year of CC0 video podcasts featuring 29 high quality guests from both inside of nouns (Seneca, Noun 40, Jesse Pollak, Jacob, Dan Romero, Supriyo, Amir Bandeali, Will Papper) as well as outside (Mike Demarais, Vinnie Hager, winny.eth and more.)
Remained a consistent cultural touchpoint for the Nouns community, celebrating more than 2 full years of hosting The Noun O' Clock LIVE show every single day without a miss. (In fact, next week we will host our 800th episode in a row!)
During Noun O' Clock, we have also helped to curate many aesthetic nouns via FOMONOUNS, as well as Nouns for specific holidays, and more than 30 noun heads requested by 20+ people, most of whom would purchase these Nouns as a result. In combination with people who were onboarded directly to Nouns by TNS/Yellow, minting Nouns by request has** contributed towards more than 200 ETH worth of Nouns purchases at auction this year alone. **Here is a breadown of that data by request:
Acted as a community connection, media partner and ambassador for other nounish builders and projects such as Nouns Esports, Nouns Movie, Nouns Deli, Rounds.wtf, Nounish Boardgame, Ledger x PlayDNA, Nouns DAO Japan and more.
Made significant strides towards self-sustainability, raising over $200,000 USDC via auctions, grants and mint revenue for The Yellow Collective (earmarked specifically to support onchain artists and creators) plus an additional $115,000 in outside grants, mint revenue and partnerships for The Noun Square's operations.
We are asking Nouns here for 89 ETH in funding to continue these important initiatives for the next 6 months, with an intentional focus on continuing to refine and grow our video production output, stoking the fires of the burgeoning Yellow community, and acting as a leader in our community in the category of project self-sustainability. To that end, our goal is to extend this next term with outside revenue (as we have done every time so far) and we plan to turn 6 months of runway into 12 months of Nounish impact.
NB: After receiving feedback during candidate stage, we have lowered our overall ask by 8%, and it now represents a 30% decrease from our previous proposal in absolute terms. If we consider the cost per month to Nouns over our 12 month term goal, it's actually almost 50% less than our previous ask. We take our continued progress towards sustainability very seriously.
This proposal will now briefly touch on each of the above-listed achievements, and then lay out our plan and strategy for new growth and experimentation over the next 6 months.
In January of this year, 9+ months of planning culminated with the launch of The Yellow Collective; a Nouns Builder-enabled fork of nouns on Base, with the goal of leveraging the vibrant community of artists we had grown over the previous 2 years at The Noun Square into a self-sustaining flywheel that would fund onchain creators and onboard them to the nouns ecosystem.
Eight months later, Yellow stands apart as one of the most active and vibrant nounish communities onchain, and we have celebrated the following successes so far this year:
We have raised over 40 ETH from daily auction proceeds on yellowcollective.xyz.
We have raised a further 60 ETH from other sources (20 ETH from outside grants, 10 ETH from merchandise and other and revenue, and 30 ETH from minting revenue so far this year.)
We have paid out 50 ETH in art contests, commissions and mint revenue sharing with artists and creators + more than 1 ETH in mint-split revenue back to Nouns via the treasury's proxy addresses on Base and Zora.
We've grown our community organically to 163 holders, 80% of whom (131) are all in a very active group chat on Warpcast.
For many (maybe even most) of our holders, a Yellow Collective Noun was their first introduction to Nouns, and some like Yes2Crypto have gone on to join Nouns as well.
We have successfully collaborated with many onchain communities such as $HIGHER, $DEGEN, $BUILD, $IMAGINE, $NOGS, Verbs, Basepaint and Moshicam on Art Contests and other initiatives.
We have run over a dozen art contests using Uplink and Rounds.wtf and have distributed $50,000 worth of ETH, DEGEN, HIGHER and other tokens to artists and creators so far this year via Rounds alone.
We have been recognized by Jesse Pollak and the Base team as one of the most impactful teams building in their ecosystem.
We have achieved and surpassed our primary goal of generating enough revenue so that our ongoing art contests and creator onboarding initiatives could be completely self-funded.
Artists we have collaborated with have told us that Yellow was the community that first piqued their interest in Nouns and led them to explore our ecosystem more.
One of our core directives at Yellow has been to host frequent Art Contests to flood our channels with fun and nounish UGC. We have hosted 15 such contests so far this year, originally on Uplink.wtf and later leveraging Rounds.wtf.
As you can see, the results have been incredible.
A huge thank you to Seneca and the Rounds team for making it painfully easy for communities like ours to run contests that both leverage and broaden our social graph at the same time.
Many in Nouns have expressed a desire to see creators and builders experiment more with minting content onchain and pushing nounish minting culture forward generally. We took this to heart, and over the past 10 months, we have focused our efforts on maximum experimentation with onchain distribution for both Yellow art drops and various pieces of TNS video content.
The results speak for themselves:
As you can see in the chart above, we have been able to drive over 51,000 unique mints on our onchain content this year, representing 38,000 unique wallets and over $90,000 in minting revenue.
We have accomplished this by building a strong community on Farcaster and releasing both collaborative art drops and video content there in an onchain-first way with Boosted Zora minting frames, and also by leaning into the amplification and support of Nouns-peripheral ecosystems and communities like Base, Zora, Optimism, Higher, Degen, and others.
We have also been able to grow our Zora profile to 8,800 Followers, and the /yellow channel to 19,500 followers, which have both helped with distribution of our mintable content. You can check out everything we have released onchain this year on our Zora Profile.
We believe that these onchain metrics are the most important indicators that we are reaching our intended audience while at the same time helping to bring us closer to a more self-sustaining media distribution model.
We recently celebrated the one year anniversary of our TNS-produced Zero Rights Reserved Podcast (ZEROPOD.XYZ) on July 28, during which time we have hosted 29 incredible guests talking about different perspectives on the theme "Enjoying Ethereum", from a thoroughly nounish perspective. These have included many high profile guests such as Luca Netz, Seneca, Noun 40, Jack Butcher, Jesse Pollak, Vinnie Hager and many more.
We released this commemorative short called "Thank You For Having Us" to celebrate 1 Year of ZEROPOD.
ZEROPOD episodes (and clips from them) have been released both via traditional web 2 distribution platforms (YouTube, Spotify, X) and onchain distribution (Zora, Warpcast), with an intentional focus on the latter.
On Spotify, episodes have received an average of 60 listens each, while on YouTube that number is about 150 Listens per episode. These together represent a combined nearly 8000 full listens/views over the first year, which is quite a solid base for a podcast in a niche category.
Meanwhile, the onchain versions of ZEROPOD have been minted by collectors on Zora more than 4000 times, and our commemorative "Thanks for Having Us" mint linked above also received 2300 mints in its own right.
The individual feedback we have received from listeners and watchers of the podcast have been really positive, with 2 guests on separate occasions calling it "the best podcast I've been on" and listeners saying they never miss an episode, and that certain episodes really helped them to better understand Nouns:
In addition to ZEROPOD, we have also put a special focus this year on producing short and medium-length educational videos, and in similar fashion to ZEROPOD, on distributing them via both traditional and onchain channels.
With JackWyldes (Seth) at the helm, our video content team has been been getting great results with a variety of content, some with a narrow Nouns focus, and others with an educational focus on Nouns-adjacent onchain topics like Base, Farcaster and the Superchain.
Our Nouns Round Up series, which aims to summarize everything that happened in the Nouniverse each month in one 5 minute clip, has been a crowd favorite. We have received thousands of impressions on this Series across X, YouTube, Spotify and Warpcast, and an average of 100 mints per episode of the onchain versions on Zora. Additionally, community members have frequently thanked us for keeping them up to date, while other nounish builders have expressed appreciation for having their efforts highlighted and amplified.
With all of our video content combined, we recently surpassed the milestone of over 30,000 views on our YouTube:
We have also been experimenting with creating custom video pieces highlighting standout nounish builders, a niche that had been left vacant after Nounish doubled down on their promising IG content. Check out "Better Between Bread", our 5 minute spot on 87Bones & Nouns Deli, as well as our recent Spotlight on Seneca and Rounds.
Our video content has also extended to other corners of the onchain universe. For example, here is a series called Farcaster 101 that was quite popular on Warpcast. And here is a video detailing Optimism's "We Heart the Art" contest that was shared broadly by the OP Team. Jack also created a short film called Welcome to Onchain Summer that was shared by the Base team and minted 12,000 times so far! Carlos and Toady have been hosting a "Based Builders" Show as well, first on X (audio) and later on YouTube Live video.
We see this as an obvious strategy, because there is such a dearth of quality, easy-to-digest content on some of these topics, which presents many opportunities for us to represent both nouns and nounish first principles like CC0 and education in the broader onchain space.
We are positioning ourselves as a trustworthy producer of open source, entertaining & educational content about onchain topics, while also walking the walk by pushing and experimenting with onchain distribution for these same videos.
In addition to medium and longer form educational content, we are also committing time and resources to clipping relevant shorts from our longer form videos and podcasts too, which are then shared across socials such as YouTube Shorts, TikTok, instagram, X and Warpcast. Many of these shorts are outperforming the long form content they are clipped from in terms of both views and impressions.
As a bonus, because our content is all CC0, other accounts like Leo Clarke's "Nouns News" have been clipping shorts from our videos as well, which we have been able to repurpose and re-share.
In June, we celebrated the 2 Year anniversary of The Noun O' Clock LIVE Show, and next week while this proposal is active, we will also be celebrating our 800th daily episode in a row, without missing a single day.
The Noun Square team has always worked together to make sure we are consistently there to celebrate NOC as a "moment of celebration for the internet" (h/t 4156) and a daily cultural touchpoint for the Nouns community.
Earlier this year, we made a bold decision to move our show from X Spaces, where it had been for more than a year, over to Brennen's new onchain-enabled and Farcaster-integrated hangout client Tavern FM. We knew that we risked losing some of our usual audience because of the migration, but wanted to stay true to our goals of being as onchain as possible and wanted to be able leverage the growth we were seeing on Farcaster as a result of The Yellow Collective, while also mitigating any risk of deplatforming. You can see and listen back to all our Tavern Spaces on our profile here.
Now, 8 months later, Tavern is emerging as the early frontrunner in the Farcaster-voice space, with other prominent communities and content creators like Late Night Crew and @ted now hosting daily and weekly shows there. We are excited to conitue to grow NOCL alongside Tavern as a platform in the coming months!
In addition to keeping the community informed about everything happening in the Nouniverse, and adjacent ecosystems like Farcaster, Base and the Superchain, we have also kept the energy up around minting fun and meaningful Nouns via FOMONOUNS.
Some of the handsomest Nouns we've helped to mint this year.
Of course, as in the past, we have been able to mint some fine-looking specimens, and some special heads for special occasions, and First-Ofs for the newly added traits, but more important than that is how we have been able to use NOC and FOMO as an opportunity to help find people their Forever Nouns.
Just this year, we have already helped to mint Nouns by request or curation for at least twenty nouners, including Carlos Melgar, The Bower, Val Taylor, NounsMX, $NOGS, Carlos Juar, Sam S, Peterpandam, Yes2Crypto (x5!), Humpty, The Park, Nounspacetom, Mono, 87Bones, TheWarDoctor, PatYiu + our very own Benbodhi, Robotfishgirl and Brett.
Some of the above list were also expressly onboarded to Nouns more generally by TNS and Yellow, like Carlos:
**Our efforts have helped to impact more than 200 ETH in Nouns purchased this year between direct onboarding, community support efforts and FOMO minting. **Here again is a chart breaking down these numbers YTD:
Conclusion: TNS is making real, tangible impact in many ways with this one little daily ritual.
As a constant active and energetic force in the Nouniverse, we are often approached by other funded Nounish builders and projects to help amplify their work or collaborate in other ways, and we are always more than happy to do so.
Some examples of this kind of DAO and community support:
Increasing the sustainability of our project has been top of mind for us for more than a year, and we have made more efforts and inroads on this front than almost any other funded group.
Last time we put up a proposal, we reported that we had self-raised 22.14 ETH in total (just under $45K USD at that time) and we set ourselves an audacious goal to double that amount in revenues, sponsorships, and outside grants in the subsequent six months.
This one is for Jarmen, he's a visual learner.
Part of those funds have allowed us to nearly double the length of our current mandate from the DAO, and part belong to The Yellow Collective, but which is well-equipped now to continue funding and empowering artists without needing further funding from Nouns.
Here is the list of the different initiatives and strategies we have employed this year to meet and exceed our sustainability objectives:
We are proud to have lead by example in this area so far, and we plan to continue to aggressively pursue several outside revenue sources in our upcoming Season. We have already achieved our internal goal of making the "Art Contest and Artist Onboarding" portion of our mandate fully sustainable and spun out as its own fledgling flywheel in The Yellow Collective. Our hope now is to continue pushing towards further sustainability for our own TNS operations as well.
We are very excited about the future of The Noun Square, ZEROPOD and The Yellow Collective. Here are some of our top level goals for the next six months:
-Art Contest Prizes and Administration: Previously 4 ETH/mo, now $0 (Fully sustained by Yellow Collective revenue)
TNS Operations: -Social Accounts Management (X, Warpcast): 1.5 ETH/mo -Spaces/Tavern Hosting (Approx 40/month): 2 ETH/mo -ZEROPOD organization, interviews, editing, production, distribution, etc: 3 ETH/mo -Other Video Content Production and Distribution (Nouns Round Up, educational content, nouns project highlights, etc.): 2 ETH/mo -Short content creation and distribution for TikTok, instagram, YT reels, etc.: 1.5 ETH/mo -Light Content Promotion on X, YT, Zora: 1 ETH -BD work for sponsorships and grants: 1 ETH -General Administration (Event Scheduling, Interview Scheduling, Prize Distribution, Yellow Collective administration, and miscellaneous): 2.83 ETH/mo
Total Per Month: 14.83 ETH
**Total Proposal Ask: 89 ETH **(Reduced by 7% from Candidate Proposal)
TNS and Yellow are lead by a core team who eat, sleep and breathe nouns. In fact, four of us have purchased Nouns of our own.
We are:
-Toady Hawk: Project management, strategy, spaces hosting, podcast hosting, video ideation & production, editing & distribution, social media management, administration, BD. -Benbodhi: Funds and prizes distribution, website design & administration, discord admin, strategy. -Robotfishgirl: Spaces/Tavern hosting, discord moderation, strategy. -JackWyldes: Video ideation, production, hosting, editing. -Santhosh: Scheduling, video editing, short video editing. -Symbiotech: Social media management, Discord moderation. -BrettDrawsStuff: Spaces/Tavern cohosting, Yellow community.
Occasional Contributors: Carlos Melgar, ProfWerder, SuperTightWoody, Xargs, Kyrowolf
Core Team will collaborate to allocate funds to team members based on their contributions to the monthly operations budgets outlined above.
TNS operates a multi-chain SAFE at 0x73c19e2A309400724689103A5BA483511C09633e, which is a 3/6 multisig with the following trusted signers: Toady Hawk, Benbodhi, Robotfishgirl, Symbiotech, SuperTightWoody & Prof Werder.
A sincere Thank you to everyone who made it this far. We know governance is hard work and we appreciate your attention and your time.
We believe that we are making a meaningful impact for nouns every single day with our community-building, content creation and collaborative energy, while pushing the boundaries of both onchain minting distribution and project sustainability.
We hope the DAO agrees! ⌐◨-◨
