This is my first post in over a year because I was sucked into the crypto world. I worked for a blockchain gaming startup called Polemos, managing, writing, interviewing and making videos, and in all the months I haven’t been writing to you, I’ve been learning. Mostly learning things about YouTube and gaming, but also about how some humans are motivated by the desire to make money and some are motivated by the desire to play. These worlds seem to be mutually exclusive.
One of the downsides of the Polemos job was that no one understood what I was doing. It turns out no one normal gets blockchain technology, and when you add gaming into the mix, it gets even more confusing. This was a source of frustration for me initially: I wanted people to understand the promise of gamers being able to really own virtual game items, and to be able to trade them on markets independent of game developers.
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This proposition – to really own virtual items – is the clearest use case of blockchain in gaming. To understand this, I had to wade through a sea of BS. Also, as I spent more time in the crypto world, I realised that the mainstream impression of crypto – dodgy, incomprehensible, all about money – was basically correct. The general public doesn’t know enough to be hoodwinked by the tech.
The journey began with a former ninemsn colleague Richard McLaren contacting me. Richard is one of the smartest and nicest guys I have worked with, so I leapt at the chance to learn something about the startup he was working for. He was Polemos’ CTO (chief technology officer), they were developing a platform for gamers to rent virtual game items rather than buy them. The problem was that no one knew they existed – they needed an audience. I told him I could get him one.
The challenge
It proved to be difficult. At ninemsn, we were publishing to the biggest Australian digital audience – millions of people every day. At Newshub in New Zealand, we started at 300k monthly uniques and reached more than a million by the time I left (digital only – we also had a big offline TV and radio audience. Note that Newshub is currently being shut down by Warner Bros Discovery).
At Polemos, I began with zero.
Polemos had a Discord (gaming chat server) with 10,000 subs but for the life of me, I couldn’t get a peep out of them. Same with Twitter. This is not uncommon in the crypto world, where large numbers of disengaged users are either bought or drawn in by the promise of giveaways. The website traffic was sitting at noise level, as the occasional crawler bot checked in. It was a helpless feeling, that void. I realised in the past I’d always been gifted an audience, and grown them. This was different.
I began with what I knew: news. News is a great firestarter because it’s high frequency, high volume and high relevance content. Most people want to know what’s going on, even if they think they don’t – although news avoidance is high and maybe growing, my feeling is that’s an editorial fault rather than the audience’s problem. Sick of the Middle East? You’re not alone. Audiences don’t like being force fed what is supposedly good for them. Relevant news has every chance of success.
The problems at Polemos were deep, however. I inherited a small and mismatched team – game experts, animators, producers – and had to sack, hire and set expectations. The process of publishing was exploratory, feeling out the shape of the void with our antennae. We tried text articles, newsletters, podcasts, and videos. We experimented with live streams, and buying audience on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. As the antennae twitched about, it became clear the blockchain gaming audience was non-existent. A couple of months in, I interviewed the head of a gaming studio who frankly told me there were only 15,000 blockchain gamers in the entire world. The penny dropped. Even those 15k were doing it for the money. The content we were making specifically on blockchain gaming didn’t have an audience. Furthermore, we were pushing ideology, and that’s boring.
So we switched to mainstream games. Real games, the kind that fuel an industry three times bigger than Hollywood. And we began publishing exclusively on Youtube. With that combination – one platform, one broad topic – we had enough clarity to begin experimenting in earnest. The antennae had finally come up against something solid. It seemed to stretch on forever. Gaming is big.
The plan
The overarching strategy was to engage audiences in separate Youtube channels dedicated to specific gaming genres, and then push blockchain games of the same genre later. The Youtube environment is flooded, and it’s common to get a handful of views on a video: our engagement technique was to focus on a big game launch, cover that game, and then move on to the next. We published a mixture of long and short form: shorts (vertical videos under 60s) are perfect for news and tips, long form can focus on gameplay and guides. Shorts help because they get 10x more reach (at least) and can build subscribers and momentum for the channel. We found we had to put in massive effort on each long form video. Sadly, there was no substitute for doing the work. In the absence of magnetic on-camera personalities, we had to provide actual useful information.
It worked. Our RPG (Role Playing Game) channel fired with the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 – the biggest and most well-received game of 2023 – and we followed with success in Action (Dragon’s Dogma 2 a big game there) and the News channel (Hell Divers 2 was big). By March 2024, one year in, we were reaching over 1.3 million monthly viewers, and growth had been exponential. There is no reason to believe it would not have continued.
What was missing was the bridge back to blockchain gaming. Mainstream gamers were not neutral when it came to crypto – they were hostile. Our attempts to channel the audience back to blockchain games failed, and eventually Polemos decided to cut costs and focus on a B2B strategy solely based on the lending tech. That decision made sense to me. Whether the startup works now rests entirely on whether a blockchain game achieves breakthrough success. The odds are long.
I mentioned, at the start of the post, two different groups of people: the money makers, and people who love to play games. In the Venn diagram with those two circles, the overlap is tiny. A content strategy can only work when the available audience lines up with the wider business strategy.
What I learned about Youtube and the modern content environment in my time at Polemos was informative. It is a brutal world. I can’t extrapolate from my experience to make blanket statements about the viability of all content, but here are some thoughts:
- Twitter was never good as a traffic source, now X is useless. X is effectively a sealed platform for elites, which may still be relevant for influence but cannot assist otherwise.
- Facebook no longer works for news and news-adjacent content, and building search traffic seems extremely tough for a startup (compared to how it used to be).
- For these reasons, I no longer believe in content startups that don’t have laser topic focus and significant commercial innovation. How are you going to build an audience? What are you going to do with them when you’ve got them?
- In an area where algorithmic success is still possible (Youtube), competition is ferocious and rewards correspondingly meagre.
- Despite the bleak picture, success is still possible – if you have at least a year up your sleeve to build audience, and your business model aligns with that audience.
It feels good to be back writing to you. In future newsletters I will revisit AI, which you may recall I was enthusiastic about a couple of years ago and which subsequently went mainstream, and I’m going to refresh my investigation into The Economist’s insane global pricing policy. The original post is my most successful to date.
On AI, I also want to draw your attention to what my friend and former ninemsn colleague Shaun Davies is doing with his Dumplings Over Hype newsletter. You should subscribe to that immediately. Another recommendation is Tim Burrowes’ Unmade, which you probably already know about,