Why Are All These Influencers Cloning?

So... Why are we seeing so many people in the cryptosphere impersonating others with high fan/follower counts on social media? This is an actually interesting use case to examine, as 2key’s product aims to alleviate some of the market failures around influencer marketing today. Quite simply, in today’s cryptosphere there’s little alternative to human-based marketing, and due to lack of result-driven protocols, there’s currently little alternative for blockchain projects other than to find big influencers (by follower-count), and pay fixed-prices per the influencer's name, having little correlation with actual results delivered.

2key.network aims to open up human-based marketing for everyone so that no matter what’s your name, you can earn reputation and money only for bringing in actual conversions, and no matter what’s your name, you can lose reputation and money for abusing the network or ill-serving campaigns. Building reputation on a 1600 category taxonomy spanning all walks of life, 2key referrers may be big influencers or your taxi driver, and they build their social capital, not as a single number of “fan count” on a centralised platform, counts which may be bought, hacked, faked or simply irrelevant to your specific campaign. Rather, the 2key reputation scores are gained and lost based only on actual delivery of good/bad results in category-specific campaigns. With 2key, marketers earn per results, not per name.

Today’s influencer marketing models are broken, paying per name rather than paying per results, and since the crypto space is often blocked from marketing via major robotic ad platforms, human-based marketing has risen to become a substantial part of the marketing possibilities for blockchain based products. But having no result-driven methods to facilitate human-marketing, the Influencer name-based economy has risen, awarding those who have amassed high fan counts, regardless of actual conversion counts per campaign/project, and forcing all others who don’t have high fan counts, to either stay out from marketing or try to impersonate the high profile players who are still able to make money from their name as a sole asset. 2key.network is designed to solve these market failures, here’s how:

In today’s crypto markets, there’s no effective results-based marketing method for selling tokens or any fungible/non-fungible blockchain-based assets for that matter. The main method currently available is through influencers, who usually charge a fixed-price, making advertisers Pay Per Name rather than Pay Per Result. The Name of an influencer is actually quite an inaccurate and false metric for predicting the actual results delivered from the influencer’s actions on a specific campaign, and as we’ll see, having the Name as the prominent predictor proxy for delivery of marketing results causes a lot of deception and abuse in the market, as without a big name with many “followers”, a potential marketer stands little chance of even attracting an opportunity to help token based projects market themselves.

2key aims to disrupt all of that, by levelling the playing field, allowing anyone to earn money and reputation for successfully marketing token sales, and empowering blockchain and crypto projects to Pay Per Result, so that the big influencer with 1M followers and the little influencer with 500 followers, can both simply get a link, and earn income based solely on their ability to actually deliver conversions. Quite often, the little influencer who is more specific in a certain sub-domain can be more effective than the general big influencer with a big “followers” count, which is another metric which can be hacked and bought. So moving towards a fully tracked, Pay Per Conversion method will ramp up the market as a whole, and allow anyone to try and market tokens for projects they believe in and can rally support for. This can be a real big thing for the crypto market, to help marketers and publishers move away from trying to hack big “likers” or “fan” counts on centralised platforms, either by paying robotic systems or impersonating ones who have, towards actually working to deliver and earn per actual conversions each marketer/influencer/referrer/publisher delivers per each specific campaign.

So here’s the thing. In today’s influencer marketing, as an advertiser — e.g. a project trying to sell its tokens, you get a very bad deal. You need to pay a fixed price, per the demand of the influencer, regardless of actual results/conversions, which can’t accurately be measured. So the only tangible asset being exchanged for money currently is followers counts. Now followers count is something that can (A) be hacked, (B) be bought, meaning © it can be faked, and (D) is a general metric not necessarily relevant to your specific campaign/project/product. Nevertheless, if you’re a big influencer with many followers, you can charge a high amount of money for speaking/mentioning a project, but the project would actually just be paying the Influencer for a very up-funnel metric which has little to do with actual delivery of business results; Basically, in today’s influencer marketplace, we’re paying something like CPPV —  Cost Per Potential View, or SCPPC — Speculative Cost Per Potential Conversion. Now, why is this? Well, if you’re an influencer with a 100 followers on some ad platform (e.g. instagram/youtube), in most cases you’ll have to pay the platform to reach all of them, or most of them at least, so having this influencer just shout out your project’s name on their channel/profile would not necessarily mean all their followers would get the message. And even then, it’s very unclear how many of the influencer’s following is actually relevant as a target audience for the specific advertiser’s campaign/product.

Nevertheless, in today’s market, influencers charge a fixed price per their “following” size, which, as we’ve seen, will not be reached unless someone pays the robotic platform for it (facebook, google etc..), and even then, the actual lift in interest likelihood within the influencer’s following in context of the specific project isn’t at all assured. Speaking from experience of scientifically investigating target audience interest lifts within an influencer’s audience in context of various campaigns, I can assure you that a “big” influencer with 1M followers, could often be less effective than another with 10K followers, if the second is much more influential per follower in the context of your specific campaign/product.

Now, in the cryptosphere, influencer marketing has become a flagship channel. But since there’s no easy way to measure and pay influencers per actual delivery of conversions stemming from their influence, it all boils down to Pay Per Name. So unless you’re a big name with many followers, you might as well impersonate to be one, so that someone in the midst of confusion might throw you a bone .. This is unhealthy for the market as a whole, since advertisers aren’t paying for actual results delivered, and the asset of social influence is very inaccurately measured, incentivised or rewarded.

With 2key.network, any project selling fungible or non-fungible assets, like ERC20 tokens, could sell them utilizing the power of social sourcing. So that anyone — influencer or referrer, publisher or just an ordinary user, big or small, everyone could just get their link, and be rewarded directly in consequence and relation to actual conversions delivered — in the case of crypto projects — you would get income in direct response to the amount of token sales you brought in to a project. With 2key, there’s a new way to measure and reward social impact, and a new model for human-based marketing, one that can include everyone who wants to participate, and incentivize the market to optimize around actual results-delivery, rather than false vanity metrics.

Be it.