You highlighted great points.
I am involved in several crypto projects and the struggle is all the same. "How to get some traction onto our project through a real community?" In those cases we usually start from zero. But here on Hive, the Community already exists, the blockchain is greatly working and the Metcalfe Law is smiling at Hive.
I appreciated the numbers from the Gods Unchained. 3-4k are a decent prize because the rest are mainly doing airdrops for something in the 100$s order of magnitude.
Creating a new contest with new communities and games would benefit both. Setting rules about what Hive community can give to a project and what the project can give to Hive would be mutual beneficial.
I am active also on Publish0x and there, there are cash prizes for writing articles. The company pays some money, Publish0x setup the prizes and the winners takes some money. I won cash prizes several times and the highest one was 120$. Publish0x is quite more centralized but we can do something similar also here: a company pays the fee, a curator convert the money in Hive and then it will distribute prizes according to a voting jury. We would attract users, business partners and creating some buying pressure as well.
One more idea, would be getting some youtubers involved. They can bring tons of traffic.
I will start writing a guide on Hive on my Medium platform as well as here, since it's an idea I had since three weeks and I am now starting deploying it.
So creating posts about awareness on Hive retention: meaning not just onboarding users but warning them that they should be here for the long run and not simply for a grab-and-run bag of money.
If I can support in some ways, I am available for more talks and evaluations.
Please send me the link to your Medium publication.
https://medium.com/@mikezillo
Here is my profile
The reason I mentioned $3-4k being "small" in the post is that this was close to if not at the top of the last bull market, whereas the DHF has spent 350-400k the past few months at the bottom of the market (just as a comparison to the size). Meaning that if we had 10-20x the initial prizes for more contests aimed towards more communities and more consistent ones it could look a lot different, possibly even now with many being gone. Hard to say but personally I think it'd be worth a try at least starting with a similar one.
Dunno about YouTubers, as I said if it's just a one time promo thing I don't think it's going to be that effective as people are just going to see it as a sponsorship/promo or direct ad. I'd rather pay a bit smaller YouTubers to be active here, cross-post and mention hive and what they think about it more often in their videos, maybe even those that create content about something that's somewhat big here, say a photography or gaming community so they can incentivize their viewers to join them and do various activities here.
Well, 3-4k$ can be small or a lot. Even higher budgets have to be very carefully managed otherwise we would risk that people join just for the prizes.
I suggest you to get a look at the Publish0x way of acting in the Contests. Here is one of the last I took part to. Publish0x has these stats https://www.publish0x.com/stats
With 1200$ of budget per contest, there were tens of posts submissions with consequent shares on social profiles.
We can start with the first one about why writers joined the Hive-chain AND why they would suggest people to join it.
To take part into one contest I once submitted also a song, winning the prize for the most original submission that create a huge hilarity.
About Youtubers, I see your point. Having them involved would be the best solution because they can tell the story but showing results and proofs would be the best solution. So I think it can be a matter of involving ONE youtuber that is monetizing his/her channel, telling "hey, do you know that Hive can make you monetize much better and more easily your contents?". He/She starts for some time and once he/she starts publishing results, others will follow because youtubers are growing in number and many of them are starving