Balanced Ad Campaign on Brave Ads

Hello everyone, I’ve been brainstorming how to spread the word about Balanced. One thing that came to mind was submitting a CPS proposal and purchasing an ad campaign on Brave Ads.

For those who don’t know, Brave is a privacy-centric web browser that has built-in support for some cryptos. Because of this, Brave is a popular web browser within the crypto space. As of February 2021, Brave has over 25 million monthly active users.

When opening a new tab in Brave, users are often presented with a splash ad like the one below. Since Brave is a popular browser in the crypto space, many of the ads are related to crypto. The one below is an ad for Nexo, and I’ve seen ads for a variety of other crypto products.


I think this would be a great opportunity to advertise Balanced to a key demographic. Below are a few initial ideas, and I plan on submitting this into the next CPS round. Please share your feedback, and let’s get a plan going!

  • Brave has a few ad tiers. The lowest tier is $1,000-$2,500. I need to do some more research on the tiers, but my guess is that starting off with one of the lower tiers and measuring engagement/results before increasing spending is the best way to go.
  • I’ve already reached out to Parrot9 about using some existing Balanced graphics for the ad.
  • I’ve reached out to Scott Smiley for some assistance as the application form requires some stuff like a business address, entity name, etc.
  • I’m thinking about creating a simple website that would allow new users to claim a small amount of ICX (maybe 4-5 ICX) to get them started on the platform. The link would be embedded in the ad somewhere, and be locked down as much as possible (e.g. maybe it only works when the user-agent requesting the link is Brave browser). On the page, maybe there would be a form to submit an ICX address in order to claim the ICX. Obviously there are downsides like one person claiming all the ICX. To combat that, perhaps there could be IP address rate limiting, submitting an email address, and some other things – please give me more ideas! In either case, I think this user acquisition cost would be worth it because it lowers the friction to used Balanced a lot. Even with a great looking ad, I can’t imagine a high engagement rate if people have to go to an exchange to buy some ICX first.

Let me know what you think!

One minute later, someone has shared this with me - https://blog.zilliqa.com/support-our-twitter-campaigns-earn-zil-via-our-new-tool-socialpay-950eb67a7b1

Maybe we can build something like this for ICON? Tying an ICX address to someone’s Twitter handle could be a good way of getting them started, and might be a good way to reduce the chance of someone taking advantage of the system.

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I don’t know much about the ad component of brave but this is a must. I don’t think we need to limit this to just balanced either. We have lots of projects that ICON has that we can market. Nebula, Epicx, NFT Bazaar, Craft, BTP…we could really make this an ICON centric ad campaign

I use brave a lot and have used crypto products from the brave attention system and if I had no idea about BalancedDAO was and it popped up I am sure I would click on it, this is an easy and effective way to get eyes on…

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We propose this with iconplus way back ICONPLUS & PICONBELLO 10X Social Medial Engagement Accelerator which is the same thing. Than we propose more simple version where who created the tweet fund the distributed reward which is finalized with tipicon on twitter.

Overall I think it’s a great initiative, I’d vote for it if it appears on CPS.

It’s going to be botted. Here are few things possible prevent someone from exploiting it:

  • reCaptcha sounds like a nobrainer
  • Requires the client to compute a PoW for claiming the ICX, similar idea to Hashcash from preventing email spams
  • IP restrictions; not only for preventing multiple claims from a same IP, but also for banning popular proxies, VPNs and any non-residentials IPs; there are few services for that, usually they’re not free but there are few exceptions such as iphub.info that provides a simple API for free (1000 queries/day). Anyway these services aren’t very costly anyway.
  • Limit the amount of distributed ICX / hour. It’s unlikely that 100 people are going to claim all at the same time, they usually claim them at a random intervals. So spread the distribution in time as much as possible.

I don’t think the claiming part is a great idea in the current form. I can imagine that most of the ICX are going to be claimed by existing ICONists who are aware of this website, and few by new users.

Is there some ad tracking, such as a unique ID for each ad displayed we can use to check if the users are coming from the ad and not from somewhere else ? That way we could prevent someone who find out the website URL from sharing it to everybody.

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This is really like. Maybe foundation can help with funding or preps involved in Balanced could help with allocating ICX to allocate to winners / Balanced could take a percentage of fees and allocate it towards this outreach.

Best thing about it is that it encourage people to share share pictures / videos on Twitter, that will make people realize how user friendly Balanced is.

Right now most of the the communication is mostly happening on Telegram. To users who are already converted. We need to reach other people.

Social engagement will win.

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good project, Ill vote for it on the CPS :+1:

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I agree here, i have seen many side chains try to do this where they try to give a little bit of the native token for fees and users just find a way to hoard it.

This is a great idea, one of the most recent ones I have seen is the upland one and it made me click and get more interested in the platform.

i know socialpay because i also hold zilliqa, it’s a great tool!
if you can create something similar I will donate 100 icx for the campaign; thinking further we could create a business that has social disclosure as its core, I would be happy to invest in it!
sorry my english (google)

We are still holding on our side of twitter. Foundation is not willing to fund these kinds of distributions as they states earlier when we proposed something like socialpay. People can use twitter bot for distributing themselves. The bot is still in backburned with 50-60 follower we are monitoring it for a possible early release.