SERIAL INNOVATORS HOLD ALL THE ACES
THE DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF INNOVATION EXPLAINED

Did you know a typical S&P 500 company in the 1960s, was estimated to be in business for more than 60 years? But nowadays the average lifespan is only 18 years? In order to survive in today’s rapidly changing world of technology, it’s imperative that companies stay relevant, so it’s become increasingly more important for businesses to be innovative. Innovation is an ongoing priority and the creation of innovation systems to perpetually foster creativity and agility is a purposed and proactive process, however, when done right the benefits for everyone involved can be tremendous. 

Where does this innovation come from? Doblin owned by Deloitte is a company with a focus on innovation, found that after examining over 2,000 business innovations throughout history, most breakthroughs aren’t always new products, startups, or rare discoveries. They observed that innovation can be categorized within a range of 10 distinct dimensions (as shown in the infographic) and applying a combination of these 10 types of innovation has resulted in well-known, long term businesses staying ahead of their competition.

 

What Does Innovation Look Like In Practice

Companies that have been around for years have leveraged each of these 10 types of innovation in the past as well as integrating new technologies to consistently create breakthroughs of new products and services. 

Image adapted from Visual Capitalist

 

Innovation Dimensions 1-4. “CONFIGURATION”

The first four types of innovation (according to Doblin) center around the configuration of the company, and all the work that happens “behind the scenes”. Tesla’s Elon Musk said back in 2016 that “the machine behind the machine” is more important than the product. The point here is that companies with strong innovation draw on the strength of their underlying innovation systems that integrate strategy, ecosystems, development, performance management, and more, making it into one seamless and mutually supportive whole. 

Have you heard the parable about the blind people and the elephant? Each person can feel and describe a part of the animal, but none of them can get a sense of the whole, because elephants are big and so are innovation systems. They are complicated and multifaceted involving people and teams from multiple functions. Innovation systems can’t be a one-hit-wonder. They need to be designed and consistently reworked to deliver the desired level of organic profitable growth. 

An effective innovation system takes time and experience to build, also practice as well as learning from successes and failures is essential. A company needs to reassess and revalidate all the elements of its innovation system which is the “machine that makes the machine”, to ensure that it is delivering maximum value. How a company along with its products and services are organized have a crucial downstream effect and enables innovations in other categories.  

Image adapted from Visual Capitalist

Two of the most interesting examples in the infographic are Google and Markethive. Both companies made internal innovations that empowered both their people and users resulting in further advancements downstream. 

In the case of Markethive, an inbound marketing company since 1996, embraced Blockchain technology 4 years ago addressing privacy issues for the user, cryptocurrency payment solutions, along with incorporating systems and all tools under the Markethive umbrella, required for the complete inbound marketing experience. Being the first Market Network of its caliber there is very little competition that provides users with an opportunity to earn an income within the platform along with their own private endeavors and cottage businesses. 

 

Innovation Dimensions 5-6. “OFFERING” 

People or users are likely to put an emphasis on a company’s offering above all other innovation categories. The way a product performs is important and more important are the improvements to product performance which can be a difficult type of innovation to uphold. A company with a deeply ingrained culture towards innovation with a focus on continual advancements will have a distinct advantage over the competition. 

This is where all dimensions of innovation come into play. Doblin recommends that all companies need to focus on combining multiple areas of innovation together. It creates a much more stable economic moat. 

_{Image adapted from Visual Capitalist}

According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Apple is on top of the leaderboard with a reputation for innovation, however, its company’s strategy is underappreciated. Intrinsically, Apple has put a great deal of thought into its ecosystem of products, ensuring they work together flawlessly creating additional utility. It also makes it harder for consumers to switch away from Apple. 

Markethive is also one-stop-shop creating ease of utility for newbie marketers and savvy entrepreneurs. It offers collaboration within the Markethive ecosystem as well as access to various platforms externally that serve a similar purpose. Historically, a leader in the field of inbound marketing, with its proprietary tools, has bundled individual products and services together along with integrating newer technologies to create a robust, scalable system, bringing more value to the user. No need to go anywhere else, it all comes to you. 

 

Innovation Dimensions 7-10. “EXPERIENCE”

The experience innovations are the ones where the users or consumers are most involved. It puts the company in the limelight as innovations in experience all get trialed by the users. It stands to reason that intense care is needed when rolling out these ideas.    

Service innovations enhance the utility, performance, and value of an offering, making the product or service easier to use. Customer engagement innovations are about understanding the aspirations of consumers and users and using those insights to develop meaningful connections between them and the company. 

 

Image from Visual Capitalist

Brand innovations help to ensure that customers and users recognize, remember, and prefer your offerings to those of competitors or substitutes. Great ones infuse a “promise” that attracts users and conveys a distinct identity. Channel innovations encompass all the ways that you connect your company’s offerings with your customers and users.

 

A Collaborative Platform And Ecosystem; A Serial Innovator

More than ever collaboration has become an important part of innovation. Digital technologies enable collaboration platforms that create an ecosystem by bringing a group of organizations to build a new capability, product, or service offering. Ecosystems are dynamic environments and contain lots of varied entities with multiple sources of influence and can offer users a powerful way to build new revenue streams. 

Ecosystems trade in multiple currencies, not all of which are financial, because they exist to create value through collaboration. When an ecosystem wins, the participants and users win as well, always evolving, acquiring new members, and realizing new missions as and when they come to light. 

Markethive has done that by utilizing the Blockchain and cryptocurrency collaborating with high profile coin exchanges, along with upcoming joint ventures to streamline and provide a lucrative platform for all involved. Markethive’s platform is currently live in public Beta with the first of many unique initiatives being the Banner Impressions Exchange. A franchise for Markethive Entrepreneurs and a uniquely innovative, free-market way for all advertisers to gain exposure across many domains with substantial traffic.  

 

Entrepreneurial Collaboration Within The Markethive Ecosystem 

Collaboration is an integral part of the Markethive culture when it comes to user engagement. The first Market Network with a collaborative social media interface offers all the marketing tools, digital media, live training, and tutorials allowing entrepreneurs, marketers, commercial artists, and the novice to aspire and succeed in a fluid, collaborative and nurturing environment. 

Markethive saw a need and what is lacking in the existing stand-alone social and marketing platforms and created a blockchain-driven ecosystem with its own consumer coin. A decentralized platform in which all users’ data is protected which means;

• compromising users’ data becomes impossible. 
• A meritocratic system negates being banned or suspended
• Blogcasting and messaging cannot be tracked across the web

By storing your data, information, activities, and publications across a network of computers, known as data centers, the task of compromising your data becomes literally impossible.

Markethive’s infrastructure also facilitates;

• A free marketplace where all artists and entrepreneurs can showcase and distribute their products, monetize, and get paid without the fear of reducing or losing their revenue or Markethive account. 
• Protects the users’ against losses as transactions are done within the Markethive Platform.
• A complete turnkey financial system within Markethive which enhances economic velocity.
• A free market media and content publishers with a reach well beyond existing social and market networks. 

All users have the opportunity to increase their brand awareness and financial status within the Markethive Ecosystem while building and monetizing their own private businesses. Coupled with its data centers and plans to deploy a multitude of mining hives distributed globally that will create massive surplus electricity built on a total 100% green energy that supports the core distributed decentralized data-based systems using dWave or quantum computers which utilizes the advanced theoretical technology of multiple parallel universes. 

That core of decentralized dWave database systems has a matrix/network of the blockchain around it. Monitoring, securing, and facilitating the massive database system. As it’s built on a higher generation blockchain that makes it possible to handle large social groups.

 

Conclusion

This is all very Web 3.0 and we are just at the beginning of a monolithic venture of innovation. Markethive’s culture is one of innovation, based on the power of Organic Intelligence (OI); other social and media cultures’ are one of subordination and intrusive Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

The online world where a large portion of the global population now exists is perpetually and rapidly advancing. People’s attitudes are changing with a rebellious nuance as they wake up to the dictatorial and harvesting for profit and control of Web 2.0. Markethive with its divine ethos is on a powerful mission to change this narrative and with its finger on the pulse of innovation will surely make it happen. 

The rise of the entrepreneur and the fall of destructive forces in our social platforms are here now.

The Markethive team is working around the clock on the wallet, KYC protocols, and exchange listings. We have some extremely exciting systems in the making so come to the weekly meetings on Sundays. The link to the meeting room can be found on the Markethive Calendar. 

 

 

References: Visual Capitalist – DOBLIN

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE vs CREATIVITY and the HUMAN CONNECTION in CONTENT MARKETING

Can we really trust AI to maintain and elevate our business without us in the driver's seat? 

We are now living in a world where we have the most amazing tools and resources to simplify and streamline the process of building a business to leverage our time more than ever. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now capable of writing content and used to communicate with customers, AI automation can run complete marketing campaigns, so suffice it to say these new technologies can help you create tremendous success in your business and improve your lifestyle. 

Does that mean this technology guarantees exceptional, infallible results for our business? Some will tell you it is, but here’s the thing…

All these modern marketing tools are great and definitely have their place, but consider this; the more AI automated your marketing becomes, the less human it can seem, and that is a big mistake. Will these machines undermine us as a species? Where do we draw the line? 

A Collision Course: AI Marketing, People and Process

Using AI in every aspect of running your business stifles creativity and eliminates trust. Without creativity and a relatable person at the helm, your content, and advertising gets lost in the fiercely competitive market that has evolved today. Importantly, if you are not seen as a human being and be trusted as one, potential customers will look for someone else to do business with. 

With all the different types of marketing at our disposal today, trust is still the key to success. So trust could be considered as the currency of modern marketing and creativity will be the method that builds trust. Creativity is more important than ever because it’s the attribute that separates you from the machines and everyone else.   

Humans are emotional creatures. The biological hardware that produces emotion is millions of years old, and the desire to connect with other people will never leave us. The technology has changed drastically, but we haven't. AI falls short when it comes to creativity, trust, and the human connection. 

 

Creative, Trustworthy, Curation Is A Thing 

For years now it’s been expressed that “content is king” and content marketing, or blogging with an emphasis on original content is a must if you want to build your audience and personal branding. Content marketing is about providing valuable, engaging information to your audience which then puts you in a trusted position to be able to present that audience with your related offer, using messages that lead to the sale. 

You develop an audience by providing unique value to your intended audience and a decade ago, creating lots of high-value content was the way to go, not so much today. In researching the history of all things marketing, particularly online, over the last 2 decades, I learned what used to work in 2008 or even 2016 is not as effective today, given the amount and in some cases, the nature of the content being churned out these days. 

Things have changed, however with change comes opportunity. The saturation of content online has created a new niche in content marketing. A creative, entrepreneurial endeavor to bring more value to your subscribers, an extension if you like. Content is no longer king – The audience is. 

A Shift In Content Marketing

In a world where we now have oodles of content, lots of noise, and for the most part less capacity for attention, people are wanting trusted guides who will connect them with what’s good, what’s important to them, and what’s real instead of fake or poorly researched. They also want content selected by trusted humans, not algorithms. 

People are also looking to trusted sources for what to buy, what to watch, where to travel etc, and in an age where we have overwhelming information and choice, the relevant curation of the work of others (when done right) is the new wave and a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, editors, writers and the like to more easily command an audience. 

Curation is the selection, organization, and presentation of online content, and even products and services, to a specific audience. So if you’re stuck for ideas to create original content consistently, this is now an accepted channel and notably, curators become trusted experts as much (in some cases more) than original content creators. The curation approach is a lot more sophisticated and powerful than most people think.

Curation At HBO

One example is Home Box Office (HBO) which is the oldest paid TV service around, but in light of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime that offer algorithmically driven on-demand platforms, also Disney Plus and Apple TV are making their mark, things have become extremely competitive, so HBO came up with a new segment called “Recommended By Humans”. 

It’s not just a marketing ploy either. Recommended By Humans is a means that provides a colorful canvas you can drag around on your desktop or mobile phone, and features 36 unique video suggestions and over 150 curated recommendations from real HBO fans. They also deliver those recommendations through an email newsletter.

HBO is tapping into the current climate which is definitely pro-human, anti-algorithm, and all for a good reason… because it’s what people now want.

 

The Broader Internet

We all agree the internet is the most powerful source of information ever conceived, but social media has actually reduced knowledge and wisdom given the spurious information and self-serving echo chambers, reinforcing misinformation, and bias. In a world of click-bait, fake news, and “deepfake” videos, smart people are looking for other trustworthy smart people to let them know what’s worth their time and attention. 

The trust component cannot be overstated. With the crushing amount of dubious data and fake news, the world needs more clarity, understanding, and meaning. People need you to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. And that’s why curation is being classed as a viable way to create a meaningful business if done correctly.

Now you may be thinking, why can’t the machines do this for us?  Wouldn’t artificial intelligence and automation be better at this? 

It has been documented that relying on algorithms to “curate” content has been a disaster so far. Facebook is a classic example where the algorithm is the reason for the echo chambers that spread disinformation and put a serious dent in democracy. Albeit these algorithms are manipulated by unscrupulous humans with an agenda to exploit and control other humans, this is not likely to happen if an editorially-focused human is in charge.   

Curation requires very human qualities like communication, empathy, creativity, strategic thinking, questioning, and even dreaming. These are commonly referred to as “soft skills,” and they are the areas that computers can’t handle, but humans excel at.

It comes down to judgment and taste, which are the hallmarks of all great editors and curators. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have those abilities, so we as humans can work alongside machines to do better work than ever. 

In other words, algorithms can aggregate and identify patterns, but they can’t interpret the specific relevance and deeper nuance of an article, podcast, or video lesson to an audience. That’s why people need other people to act as human filters for the technology that editors and curators use to sift through a mountain of information in search of truth and value.

I acquired some very insightful perspectives from Brian Clark, who is a pioneer in content marketing and veteran in the craft of content creation since 1998. He believes that organizing, collecting, preserving, and making sense of our collective knowledge is a critical task facing business and humanity in general, right now and well into the future. Algorithms can do a lot to help, but the “last mile” requires a human filter. 

Although he started off authoring original content with his very successful blogging platforms he has now turned to various forms of curation, saying,

“I got my start with online publishing and digital marketing through email newsletters. And once the fall out from the 2016 election became clear with the manufactured news, devious data capture quizzes, and false narratives, people doing genuine curation looked like geniuses.”
 

Email Marketing – Undisputed Champion

Although we have all the tools at Markethive, such as a blogging and broadcasting platform, subscribing and swiping features, blog cloud, social and digital media platform, email broadcasting and autoresponders, along with ever-increasing traffic and audience, it is email marketing that remains the undisputed champion and 40 times better at converting prospects than social media. 

It’s a way to stay connected and no matter what your preferred marketing approach, getting people on an email list is a priority according to smart bloggers, content marketers, curators, and podcasters. They have realized it is the core of effective marketing. 

So if email is the central key, apart from posting, blogging, and creating content on the Markethive platform, the added advantage of Markethive’s email systems gives you the perfect medium to disseminate your creative and valuable recommendations that are so compelling, your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails. 

Furthermore, curating content, even products, and services, could give you a much stronger value proposition (great for the affiliate marketer). Product and service curation can lead to large amounts of revenue without ever developing products and services of your own.

 

Curated Email Newsletters

When you combine a curation mindset with email, you have a winning audience-building strategy. The success of examples such as The Hustle, theSkimm, Morning Brew, and Dave Pell’s Next Draft are just a few examples of how email newsletters are helping people make sense of the things that are important to them. These examples are merely the pioneers of this mainstream media movement of curation.  

Importantly, these entrepreneurs are creating media brands that can evolve into powerhouses if they so choose and Markethive has all the hallmarks of being just that and more with the entrepreneurs at their individual helms working collaboratively on this extraordinary springboard.

That, combined with Markethive traffic, scaled by automation and optimized with analytics allows you to ascertain valuable insight that guides your business decisions. You are in the driver's seat, not some machine. 

So you as an entrepreneur, freelancer, consultant or other client-services professional will benefit from all the tools and services Markethive delivers now and into the future, whether it be the referral program, subscriber sharing, media coverage, blogcasting to many social media platforms, sponsored articles and guest posting which are all part of your traffic mix and assist in developing your email list. 

On the other hand…

you’ve got the funnel fanatics. Who needs to build a real brand or make a genuine human connection? Just create an automated funnel with a lead magnet and some shady affiliate offers, and watch the cash roll in, especially now that the term AI has come into play. 

I don’t think so. I must agree with Brian Clark when he says,  

“This is just the latest version of the perpetual “Internet Marketing Get That Money!” scam that has been fleecing “get rich quick” folks from the beginning. Most of the people who buy this funnel software never do anything; some create a small side hustle at best.

But then, what happens? The funnel technique of the day stops working. It always does, because tactics don’t last forever, especially online, and strategic brand-building takes the kind of effort that business opportunity seekers seem unwilling to invest in.”

It’s about building lasting brands, about the over-delivering value to the audience, about the foregoing short-term profit in order to build a truly powerful business. Human brands that establish themselves now will be trusted for much longer than it takes for artificial intelligence to greatly improve. And I beg to differ that AI will ever be able to take on the human element. There’s more opportunity now than ever because emerging technology will amplify the creative person, not replace them.

AI and Blockchain

Where AI is really important is in the Blockchain industry. It has had its fair share and suffered high levels of malware, phishing, and other corrupt endeavors such as fraud and scams. 

AI-based cybersecurity systems are designed to identify threats in real-time, understand the nature of the threat, and prevent future attacks by blacklisting its source. This is a great improvement on traditional cybersecurity systems as AI is designed to improve with every threat because of its ability to detect patterns, study them, and become better at dealing with them.
 
This is the real AI and critical to the security and smooth running of any online business, company, or even a platform like Markethive, driven by blockchain, that uses and employs it to discover fake accounts. Also helps to reroute faster processing, removes email that is not deliverable but keeps emails that fail to deliver due to a full inbox issue. So in this sense, it makes Markethive friendlier, and most importantly maintains the human connection.

 

Another Feather In The Cap Of Humanity

So here we have another avenue to explore that will bring more value to the people you serve and bring forth the creative, curative genius in you. A human editor to curate the web, filter out the garbage, rise above the noise to deliver reliable information to people who are drowning in and being driven mad with the mass of disinformation and propaganda. 

That’s not to say we forgo creating original content. We still need and want to write about what truly matters to us and our audience. By curating content that is relevant to our topic connects the points of the larger narrative that matter to your audience and in all probability fills the gaps. Instead of agonizing over what next to write about, if there’s nothing necessary or compelling to address, you simply work on other aspects of your business instead of creating content just for the sake of it.  

Conclusion

The Markethive platform can help you achieve your goals as it’s a multi-dimensional, social organizational integrated system with deep level linking dynamics. Integrating vast social networks reaches, internal social network connections, unlimited interconnected WordPress blogs, and APIs to news sites like NBC, Wired Magazine, Bloomberg, Western journal, and 1000s of others, that will continue to expand due to the power of your own Markethive network and the collaboration of separate Markethive groups all working in union with each other. Now that’s what I call real traffic and is reflected in Markethive’s Alexa rank. 

Currently, live in Beta, Markethive is the world’s first Market Network with a social media interface built on the blockchain. This is the next-gen of all things from the past where all the marketing tools are free to use. 

We are moving closer to the release of the Apprentice membership which is designed for the masses and will allow users to take advantage of more services, increasing the ability and potential to earn a substantial income by just being active on the platform. After we launch the Apprentice program our attention then focuses on delivering the Markethive wallet app along with KYC.
 
Markethive is transparent from the ground up and dedicated to upholding users’ privacy, autonomy and free speech which correlates perfectly with entrepreneurs who wish to use the art of curation “clean up” the web, so to speak, thereby giving a much-needed service to the people exposed to overwhelming, contradictory content, victims of tyrannical tech giants and fraudulent scams. It’s an absolute jungle out there! 

Markethive is Not Just About IDEAS. It’s About Making Ideas HAPPEN!

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE vs CREATIVITY and the HUMAN CONNECTION in CONTENT MARKETING

Can we really trust AI to maintain and elevate our business without us in the driver's seat? 

We are now living in a world where we have the most amazing tools and resources to simplify and streamline the process of building a business to leverage our time more than ever. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now capable of writing content and used to communicate with customers, AI automation can run complete marketing campaigns, so suffice it to say these new technologies can help you create tremendous success in your business and improve your lifestyle. 

Does that mean this technology guarantees exceptional, infallible results for our business? Some will tell you it is, but here’s the thing…

All these modern marketing tools are great and definitely have their place, but consider this; the more AI automated your marketing becomes, the less human it can seem, and that is a big mistake. Will these machines undermine us as a species? Where do we draw the line? 

A Collision Course: AI Marketing, People and Process

Using AI in every aspect of running your business stifles creativity and eliminates trust. Without creativity and a relatable person at the helm, your content, and advertising gets lost in the fiercely competitive market that has evolved today. Importantly, if you are not seen as a human being and be trusted as one, potential customers will look for someone else to do business with. 

With all the different types of marketing at our disposal today, trust is still the key to success. So trust could be considered as the currency of modern marketing and creativity will be the method that builds trust. Creativity is more important than ever because it’s the attribute that separates you from the machines and everyone else.   

Humans are emotional creatures. The biological hardware that produces emotion is millions of years old, and the desire to connect with other people will never leave us. The technology has changed drastically, but we haven't. AI falls short when it comes to creativity, trust, and the human connection. 

 

Creative, Trustworthy, Curation Is A Thing 

For years now it’s been expressed that “content is king” and content marketing, or blogging with an emphasis on original content is a must if you want to build your audience and personal branding. Content marketing is about providing valuable, engaging information to your audience which then puts you in a trusted position to be able to present that audience with your related offer, using messages that lead to the sale. 

You develop an audience by providing unique value to your intended audience and a decade ago, creating lots of high-value content was the way to go, not so much today. In researching the history of all things marketing, particularly online, over the last 2 decades, I learned what used to work in 2008 or even 2016 is not as effective today, given the amount and in some cases, the nature of the content being churned out these days. 

Things have changed, however with change comes opportunity. The saturation of content online has created a new niche in content marketing. A creative, entrepreneurial endeavor to bring more value to your subscribers, an extension if you like. Content is no longer king – The audience is. 

A Shift In Content Marketing

In a world where we now have oodles of content, lots of noise, and for the most part less capacity for attention, people are wanting trusted guides who will connect them with what’s good, what’s important to them, and what’s real instead of fake or poorly researched. They also want content selected by trusted humans, not algorithms. 

People are also looking to trusted sources for what to buy, what to watch, where to travel etc, and in an age where we have overwhelming information and choice, the relevant curation of the work of others (when done right) is the new wave and a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, editors, writers and the like to more easily command an audience. 

Curation is the selection, organization, and presentation of online content, and even products and services, to a specific audience. So if you’re stuck for ideas to create original content consistently, this is now an accepted channel and notably, curators become trusted experts as much (in some cases more) than original content creators. The curation approach is a lot more sophisticated and powerful than most people think.

Curation At HBO

One example is Home Box Office (HBO) which is the oldest paid TV service around, but in light of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime that offer algorithmically driven on-demand platforms, also Disney Plus and Apple TV are making their mark, things have become extremely competitive, so HBO came up with a new segment called “Recommended By Humans”. 

It’s not just a marketing ploy either. Recommended By Humans is a means that provides a colorful canvas you can drag around on your desktop or mobile phone, and features 36 unique video suggestions and over 150 curated recommendations from real HBO fans. They also deliver those recommendations through an email newsletter.

HBO is tapping into the current climate which is definitely pro-human, anti-algorithm, and all for a good reason… because it’s what people now want.

 

The Broader Internet

We all agree the internet is the most powerful source of information ever conceived, but social media has actually reduced knowledge and wisdom given the spurious information and self-serving echo chambers, reinforcing misinformation, and bias. In a world of click-bait, fake news, and “deepfake” videos, smart people are looking for other trustworthy smart people to let them know what’s worth their time and attention. 

The trust component cannot be overstated. With the crushing amount of dubious data and fake news, the world needs more clarity, understanding, and meaning. People need you to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. And that’s why curation is being classed as a viable way to create a meaningful business if done correctly.

Now you may be thinking, why can’t the machines do this for us?  Wouldn’t artificial intelligence and automation be better at this? 

It has been documented that relying on algorithms to “curate” content has been a disaster so far. Facebook is a classic example where the algorithm is the reason for the echo chambers that spread disinformation and put a serious dent in democracy. Albeit these algorithms are manipulated by unscrupulous humans with an agenda to exploit and control other humans, this is not likely to happen if an editorially-focused human is in charge.   

Curation requires very human qualities like communication, empathy, creativity, strategic thinking, questioning, and even dreaming. These are commonly referred to as “soft skills,” and they are the areas that computers can’t handle, but humans excel at.

It comes down to judgment and taste, which are the hallmarks of all great editors and curators. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have those abilities, so we as humans can work alongside machines to do better work than ever. 

In other words, algorithms can aggregate and identify patterns, but they can’t interpret the specific relevance and deeper nuance of an article, podcast, or video lesson to an audience. That’s why people need other people to act as human filters for the technology that editors and curators use to sift through a mountain of information in search of truth and value.

I acquired some very insightful perspectives from Brian Clark, who is a pioneer in content marketing and veteran in the craft of content creation since 1998. He believes that organizing, collecting, preserving, and making sense of our collective knowledge is a critical task facing business and humanity in general, right now and well into the future. Algorithms can do a lot to help, but the “last mile” requires a human filter. 

Although he started off authoring original content with his very successful blogging platforms he has now turned to various forms of curation, saying,

“I got my start with online publishing and digital marketing through email newsletters. And once the fall out from the 2016 election became clear with the manufactured news, devious data capture quizzes, and false narratives, people doing genuine curation looked like geniuses.”
 

Email Marketing – Undisputed Champion

Although we have all the tools at Markethive, such as a blogging and broadcasting platform, subscribing and swiping features, blog cloud, social and digital media platform, email broadcasting and autoresponders, along with ever-increasing traffic and audience, it is email marketing that remains the undisputed champion and 40 times better at converting prospects than social media. 

It’s a way to stay connected and no matter what your preferred marketing approach, getting people on an email list is a priority according to smart bloggers, content marketers, curators, and podcasters. They have realized it is the core of effective marketing. 

So if email is the central key, apart from posting, blogging, and creating content on the Markethive platform, the added advantage of Markethive’s email systems gives you the perfect medium to disseminate your creative and valuable recommendations that are so compelling, your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails. 

Furthermore, curating content, even products, and services, could give you a much stronger value proposition (great for the affiliate marketer). Product and service curation can lead to large amounts of revenue without ever developing products and services of your own.

 

Curated Email Newsletters

When you combine a curation mindset with email, you have a winning audience-building strategy. The success of examples such as The Hustle, theSkimm, Morning Brew, and Dave Pell’s Next Draft are just a few examples of how email newsletters are helping people make sense of the things that are important to them. These examples are merely the pioneers of this mainstream media movement of curation.  

Importantly, these entrepreneurs are creating media brands that can evolve into powerhouses if they so choose and Markethive has all the hallmarks of being just that and more with the entrepreneurs at their individual helms working collaboratively on this extraordinary springboard.

That, combined with Markethive traffic, scaled by automation and optimized with analytics allows you to ascertain valuable insight that guides your business decisions. You are in the driver's seat, not some machine. 

So you as an entrepreneur, freelancer, consultant or other client-services professional will benefit from all the tools and services Markethive delivers now and into the future, whether it be the referral program, subscriber sharing, media coverage, blogcasting to many social media platforms, sponsored articles and guest posting which are all part of your traffic mix and assist in developing your email list. 

On the other hand…

you’ve got the funnel fanatics. Who needs to build a real brand or make a genuine human connection? Just create an automated funnel with a lead magnet and some shady affiliate offers, and watch the cash roll in, especially now that the term AI has come into play. 

I don’t think so. I must agree with Brian Clark when he says,  

“This is just the latest version of the perpetual “Internet Marketing Get That Money!” scam that has been fleecing “get rich quick” folks from the beginning. Most of the people who buy this funnel software never do anything; some create a small side hustle at best.

But then, what happens? The funnel technique of the day stops working. It always does, because tactics don’t last forever, especially online, and strategic brand-building takes the kind of effort that business opportunity seekers seem unwilling to invest in.”

It’s about building lasting brands, about the over-delivering value to the audience, about the foregoing short-term profit in order to build a truly powerful business. Human brands that establish themselves now will be trusted for much longer than it takes for artificial intelligence to greatly improve. And I beg to differ that AI will ever be able to take on the human element. There’s more opportunity now than ever because emerging technology will amplify the creative person, not replace them.

AI and Blockchain

Where AI is really important is in the Blockchain industry. It has had its fair share and suffered high levels of malware, phishing, and other corrupt endeavors such as fraud and scams. 

AI-based cybersecurity systems are designed to identify threats in real-time, understand the nature of the threat, and prevent future attacks by blacklisting its source. This is a great improvement on traditional cybersecurity systems as AI is designed to improve with every threat because of its ability to detect patterns, study them, and become better at dealing with them.
 
This is the real AI and critical to the security and smooth running of any online business, company, or even a platform like Markethive, driven by blockchain, that uses and employs it to discover fake accounts. Also helps to reroute faster processing, removes email that is not deliverable but keeps emails that fail to deliver due to a full inbox issue. So in this sense, it makes Markethive friendlier, and most importantly maintains the human connection.

 

Another Feather In The Cap Of Humanity

So here we have another avenue to explore that will bring more value to the people you serve and bring forth the creative, curative genius in you. A human editor to curate the web, filter out the garbage, rise above the noise to deliver reliable information to people who are drowning in and being driven mad with the mass of disinformation and propaganda. 

That’s not to say we forgo creating original content. We still need and want to write about what truly matters to us and our audience. By curating content that is relevant to our topic connects the points of the larger narrative that matter to your audience and in all probability fills the gaps. Instead of agonizing over what next to write about, if there’s nothing necessary or compelling to address, you simply work on other aspects of your business instead of creating content just for the sake of it.  

Conclusion

The Markethive platform can help you achieve your goals as it’s a multi-dimensional, social organizational integrated system with deep level linking dynamics. Integrating vast social networks reaches, internal social network connections, unlimited interconnected WordPress blogs, and APIs to news sites like NBC, Wired Magazine, Bloomberg, Western journal, and 1000s of others, that will continue to expand due to the power of your own Markethive network and the collaboration of separate Markethive groups all working in union with each other. Now that’s what I call real traffic and is reflected in Markethive’s Alexa rank. 

Currently, live in Beta, Markethive is the world’s first Market Network with a social media interface built on the blockchain. This is the next-gen of all things from the past where all the marketing tools are free to use. 

We are moving closer to the release of the Apprentice membership which is designed for the masses and will allow users to take advantage of more services, increasing the ability and potential to earn a substantial income by just being active on the platform. After we launch the Apprentice program our attention then focuses on delivering the Markethive wallet app along with KYC.
 
Markethive is transparent from the ground up and dedicated to upholding users’ privacy, autonomy and free speech which correlates perfectly with entrepreneurs who wish to use the art of curation “clean up” the web, so to speak, thereby giving a much-needed service to the people exposed to overwhelming, contradictory content, victims of tyrannical tech giants and fraudulent scams. It’s an absolute jungle out there! 

Markethive is Not Just About IDEAS. It’s About Making Ideas HAPPEN!

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

HACKS, CENSURE, CENSORSHIP IS RIFE – DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA ARISING TO COUNTER CHAOTIC MAINSTREAM MEDIA

July 15th, 2020 will most likely go down in history as one of the worst days for Twitter in its 14-year reign as the platform that everybody who’s anybody has an active profile and trusts that their account is secure. It is known as the political discussion platform that world leaders use among other high-profile celebrities and apart from Twitter using its power to effectively flag and censor content they deem disinformation or not acceptable by their standards, it seems hackers can also mess with the accounts.   

An overwhelming hack that was reportedly taking advantage of internal tools by convincing a Twitter employee to assist in the hijacking of many high-profile accounts which enabled the hackers to take control and solicit Bitcoin donations. Among compromised accounts were those of U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, former U.S. President Barack Obama, Google, Apple, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Kanye, and Kim West along with many well-known people in the crypto space. 

The scale of the attack was enormous but apparently the financial reward was minimal. These hackers brought a $28 billion company to its knees but it seems they only collected a trifling $120,000 in Bitcoin. 

Twitter’s reputation is the real casualty as the impacts are multifold. It’s now evident the hackers had access to private communications for the accounts they penetrated and could’ve been used for much more destructive nature than just scamming crypto. Nevertheless, high-profile accounts were embarrassed, associated with scammers, and locked out of their account, regardless of any security measures they may have taken.  

Given the nature and standing of the users, it’s a mystery how and why it’s even possible for Twitter employees to usurp any account on the platform. While hacks of centralized services are quite common these days, they are rarely broadcasted in such a direct, explosive manner in real-time. 

This period of chaos and confusion went on for several hours and the hits on more accounts continued. Twitter’s response was slow and disorderly and although they must’ve been aware of what was happening, they were either unable or unwilling to shut down the platform during the pandemonium. If the report from vice.com Motherboard is accurate regarding the hackers having assistance from a Twitter employee on the inside, it makes Twitter’s controls look exceptionally weak. 

Accidental Reveal

Furthermore leaked screenshots revealed more information about Twitter’s secretive abilities to control accounts and narratives on the site. This is most damning as it is evidence that Twitter is aggressively deleting from the site and contains such keywords as ‘trends blacklist’ and ‘search blacklist’ which seems to show that Twitter does exercise some editorial bias at what content receives algorithmic boosting and what doesn’t.

This accidental reveal of Twitter’s deboosting tools will strengthen the critics’ view that Twitter is a partisan, editorializing service rather than the neutral one it claims to be. It has also been aggressively pursuing more controls alongside algorithmic, rather than chronological timelines. 

Fact-checking handled by the Moments team at Twitter is a bone of contention. It’s a challenge in areas like science and medicine, where respected authorities enforce established standards of knowledge, but it’s almost impossible in politics.

For instance, flagging President Trump’s Tweets was gutsy but seen as clumsy and although they may be experts on compiling social media posts arranging them into a narrative, it hardly qualifies them as master arbiters of truth.

Plus there’s more direct intervention in trending topics and when you consider that all of these measures make up an arsenal to control speech, it seems the perfect juncture for an autocratic oligarch to censure any discourse involving influential people. 

 

Time To Move On

We’ve come a long way since the first video of a day at the zoo on YouTube, another tech giant receiving bad press for its censorship, which has escalated into class-action lawsuits. What started out as a novel way to communicate, find friends, and deemed as “fun”, is now hazardous to our health, wellbeing, and privacy, even livelihood. 

We have been subject to numerous breaches of trust, and control by the centralized big tech platforms that have become commercialized and overtly politicized, and therefore intervene in political disputes by de-boosting particular topics and also selectively banning individuals, in some cases companies with a concept, idea or technology that threatens the status quo. 

There is growing unrest among users on these platforms that have an established model of total control, including ownership of all users’ content which retains the discretion to both monetize or “cash in” on user-contributed content and kick users off the platform for any reason.

Property rights of users’ content creation should extend to these social media platforms, however, given the current balance of power between the users and platforms, it’s not likely to happen within the current crop internet oligarchs still in the centralized Web 2.0 era. 

Instead, we are seeing a number of social media and video platforms that are censorship-resistant with a focus on privacy emerging.

 

Snapshot of LBRY.TV homepage

LBRY.TV, a video-sharing platform is decentralized with its neutral protocol that allows anyone to post content without reprisal, and stores this information on an immutable blockchain. According to CEO, Jeremy Kauffman, every time a crypto personality gets banned from a big tech platform LBRY has an influx of new users. He says, 

 “If platforms want to make the error of enforcing their political biases on their users, let the free market provide competitors like LBRY that make this problem obsolete. Innovations like LBRY make it so that the interference of Twitter and YouTube is technologically impossible.” 

Notably, LBRY specifies the wanton power to censor and deplatform that centralized platforms apply is one of its motivations for being here and is experiencing positive growth.

 

Snapshot of Minds.com newsfeed

MINDS.COM is a blogging platform that emphasizes its minimization of privacy concerns and self-described as a free “crypto social network” that upholds internet freedom. Founder and CEO, Bill Ottman aims to provide a spying free alternative to mainstream social media and pointed out that surveillance by default with little transparency into how a user’s data is used and sold. He says,

“The growth is typically a direct result of scandals with mainstream media platforms. Every day there’s a new scandal. People are looking for alternatives and want to diversify … The trend is towards open source. We’ve seen this happen in other areas already.”

The Minds platform has plans to add several new features this year and is researching the possibility of a decentralized reputation system. Meanwhile, its growth continues as it is currently trying to attract users from India where the government has banned 59 Chinese apps at the end of June this year. 

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

Since working and earning a living from home particularly online-based has become more popular and seen as a necessity in a growing number of cases, there is a platform focused on developing a complete self-sovereign ecosystem for the entrepreneur of all niches and individuals from all walks of life at any level of expertise. It does not discriminate. 

 

Snapshot of Markethive.com newsfeed

MARKETHIVE.COM is the not-so-vertical social market network media broadcasting platform that encompasses all facets of inbound marketing and digital media, built on the blockchain and takes privacy, transparency, censorship, and the ability for users to attain financial freedom very seriously. 

With a built-in newsfeed and messaging system enabling users to collaborate, along with a philosophy, in which users can freely associate and disassociate with – but not ban – other accounts, allows for the coexistence of mutually acrimonious individuals without relying on censorship from management. 

Founder and CEO, Thomas Prendergast says Markethive is a sanctuary to the millions who struggle. Markethive is just getting started. People have been making money with Markethive for years as an inbound marketing platform and saving money from tools that elsewhere would cost a lot of money. Today it has evolved into so much more including storefronts enabling the users to establish or participate in cottage businesses under the Markethive umbrella. He says,

“Markethive is a philanthropic endeavor. To give, not take, to help not exploit. Markethive is a vision with a mission – To empower and bring prosperity to every living soul with a purpose…even if that purpose is only to be free from the shackles of the Social Media tyranny we all face.” 

Still, in BETA, the continuous growth of Markethive is noteworthy as all aspects of the free inbound marketing systems are currently operational along with the micropayment faucet system and airdrops, with the release of the wallets and messenger app just around the corner. Markethive is also preparing for its video platform, conference hub, and ecommerce APIs, along with numerous loyalty programs.

The image below is a comparison chart of leading platforms in the industry and what they offer.

Problem Solved 

Each of these platforms has a monetary incentive in the form of their own cryptocurrency with its primary purpose to free and empower the people and with the politicization of Facebook, Google, and other social media giants, Web 3.0 with crypto is a sign of the times upon us. 

Although there is pressure on the tech giants from critics to stop their behavior and implement some form of decentralization, many say this would not be an easy task and not likely to happen. Even if they did, the way they behave in so many other ways is questionable. 

It has become evident that the solution to an overbearing problem is a social internet built on a decentralized blockchain where users can own and operate without the risk of losing their fundamental right to free speech, sovereignty with a capacity to prosper on all levels. 

This is a new era with the evolution of technology and the next generation. What would be even better is if these stand-alone vertical platforms work towards becoming interoperable thereby creating a collaborative network across the internet.

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN MCAFEE – A LIVING LEGEND NOW “GHOST”

John McAfee, founder of McAfee Associates and developer of the first antivirus software would have to be one of the most fascinating characters, principled but arguably has a unique set of values and jawdropping life experiences. In the eyes of some, he is a legend, for others, the most controversial figure that speaks his mind fervently. 

McAfee has had an eventful working life starting out as a door to door salesman, progressing to silicon valley working for numerous tech companies, and a software developer and cryptanalyst, with his biggest claim to fame being McAfee Software, among other things. With a fascinating life comes fascinating anecdotes, very outspoken, nothing is off-limits, and now an avid cryptocurrency supporter with a focus on privacy, not only talking about it but doing something about it. 

His life has also been filled with substance abuse, numerous lawsuits, and arrests including being involved and wanted for questioning in the murder of his neighbor in Belize in 2012. McAfee has incarcerated 21 times in 11 countries, albeit for non-violent crimes, always finding a loophole with the aid of his lawyers resulting in his release. On two occasions he faked a heart attack and a stroke to buy time for his defense. This guy is a regular Houdini.

McAfee tweets,

“My life has consisted of a series of close calls. Authorities call me "Slippery". I don't know. I only know that I will answer only to God. Not to man.”

Running For POTUS Twice – Why Not? 

In September 2015 he decided to start a new political party called The Cyber Party. He also ran for President in 2016, attempting to join the Libertarian Party, but he failed to win the nomination, with New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson winning it instead. 

With over a million followers on Twitter and just because he can, McAfee announced on June 3, 2018, via Twitter that he would run for president again in 2020, either with the Libertarian Party or under the banner of a party of his own creation. 

On January 22, 2019, McAfee announced that he would be continuing his campaign "in exile", following reports that he, his wife, and four of his campaign staff were being indicted for tax-related felonies by the IRS. McAfee indicated that he was in "international waters in his untraceable cage”

On March 4, 2020, McAfee ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Vermin Supreme, as he decided to run for the 2020 Libertarian Party vice-presidential race. The next day, McAfee tweeted that he was re-entering the 2020 Libertarian presidential primary after none of the other Libertarian candidates would “accept  him as their VP running mate.” At the 2020 Libertarian National Convention, McAfee was not nominated for president or vice-president.

In April, McAfee announced that he would be the running mate of Adam Kokesh, a competitor for the nomination, and also endorsed him for president, even though McAfee decided to continue his campaign for the presidency.

In May, Jo Jorgensen was nominated at the 2020 Libertarian National Convention, thus suspending McAfee's campaign.

The Reality

Too crazy to be elected, too rare to not be considered. The reality is McAfee doesn’t want the top job although he says would enjoy causing a stink and embarrassing the candidates on stage in the debates. He will also continue to challenge and debate on his Twitter feed. At his first AMA with the Libertarian Party, he says he does not consider himself a top presidential candidate, saying,

“I don’t want to be president. Who wants that job? We have bigger problems, people. The presidents’ lost their power back in 1960 and today they are called transients by the real manipulators and influencers who are the departments and agencies like the CIA filled with career people at the highest level who never retire…]” 

In addition to that, he says

“manipulation and influence have become institutionalized in our government”. Please people, if anybody out there thinks that I especially can ever be president of the United States, move, please, out of your mother’s basement and see the real world”. 

He goes on to explain what we as a nation can do. We can change the hearts, the minds, and the perceptions of the American public if we are realistic. Anyone can run for president and deservedly be in the spotlight but for a Libertarian to actually win the election, in a predominantly two-party preferred race it’s not realistic.   

“Victory is not winning the presidency, victory is being true to your beliefs and acting as you believe and letting the world see that. Please God, let us be real in this election”. 

  

Staying One Step Ahead Of The Feds

McAfee has been on the run from the US government for alleged charges of tax evasion narrowingly escaping arrest on several occasions. He admits he hasn’t paid income tax for 11 years, and the government actually ignored him for 8 of those years, until he was discovered giving talks about how to avoid paying income tax. In an interview with news.bitcoin.com, John McAfee believes and states,

“I’ve already paid over $50 million in taxes in my lifetime. I have not received $50 million in services. If anything I should be the one asking for a f*****g refund.”

He goes on to say that not filing a tax return is not an offense, but not being truthful about the ones you do submit is. McAfee has not filed a tax return and believes his arrest would be unlawful. 

He also says,

“Income taxes in my mind and heart, as I see the reality around us, are unconstitutional, illegal, and it pushed us back into a feudal society of over 1,000 years ago. Because what is a feudal society? One in which you belong to the king.”

McAfee and his wife Janice are staying one step ahead of the IRS and now also the SEC in light of McAfee DEX, his decentralized exchange which he launched last year, and according to McAfee are two of the most corrupt agencies of the US government. 

In a recent interview he explains that when he worked for MGT Capital Investments, a technology holding company, these agencies went after the $800 million company just to get him, which destroyed the company. They got wind of the fact McAfee was speaking out on international stages on how to avoid paying taxes by using cryptocurrency. Consequently, McAfee resigned amicably and was extremely apologetic to MGT. 

“They’re supposed to protect shareholders and just because they want me, thousands of stockholders lost everything. That’s corruption if you ask me.” 

 

We’re Not Where We Say We Are

Still underground where no one, not even family knows where they are, John and Janice McAfee post disinformation on his twitter feed so no one can track them. They may travel for a day, take photos, then come back to their hideout, post the photos saying "here we are.” He also claims to have 7 body doubles and Janice has 6. However, MacAfee makes no secret that they are in a Russian speaking country, but where that is exactly, is anyone’s guess.

 

About Face On Bitcoin Prediction

McAfee has changed his mind about his infamous bitcoin prediction and declaration that had the world talking, calling his previous prediction of Bitcoin hitting $1 million by the end of 2020 as total nonsense adding that people who believed in the absurd forecast should wake up. 

In a tweet, he stated correlating the entire North American continent GDP as an example to explain why his prediction was just a joke saying,

“If Bitcoin ever hit $1 mil, it's market cap would be greater than the GDP of the entire North American Continent.”

In another tweet, McAfee described Bitcoin as “ancient” tech and his prediction on the price going to $1 million was simply his trick to lure new users into the crypto space.

“Bitcoin was first. It's an ancient technology.  All know it. Newer blockchains have privacy, smart contracts, distributed apps and more.”

 

McAfee’s Latest Innovation

John McAfee, the cybersecurity mogul turned fugitive is still making waves and creating innovations that even have NASDAQ intrigued with his latest controversial project – the world’s first fully untraceable 4G data service titled “The Ghost Cell Phone Data Service.”  

This operates through electronic SIM technology, which allows phones to connect to a special data service network without the use of a physical SIM card. The special data service network is constructed from a number of technologies that make it impossible for connections to be tracked or traced.

Whilst only supported phones will be able to access the network, the offering is already poised to support some of the world’s most popular models, including a number of Google, Samsung, and iPhone handsets. 

                                                                                         

Phone owners will be able to access the service without having to supply any personal information. The service is prepaid, without any contract, and only requires users to scan a QR code supplied upon purchase to connect.

The service forms part of McAfee’s new Ghost ecosystem, which currently includes Ghost cryptocurrency and the GhostX Exchange. GHOST is a Proof of Stake privacy coin to help make you nothing but a "ghost" when transacting online!

McAfee is now reportedly looking for members of the mainstream media who are interested in the service to take part in the beta-testing stage, with global launch expected in September. 

Life In Exile

It seems that John McAfee always has something in the works including an autobiography that will be published next year and forthcoming movie. But according to him he and his wife now lead a boring life in exile watching the television for about 6 hours a day including the show, "The Family Guy". Now at 74 years old, still drinking like a fish and smoking like a trouper, so what’s his secret? 

McAfee describes himself as an explorer, an entrepreneur, lover of life, a lover of freedom, and very no-nonsense in spite of the absurdity of his colorful life. He just wants people to “wake up” and will continue to be outspoken on various issues, doing whatever he can to level the playing field, helping people to take back their freedom and fight tyranny and oppression. 

 

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

 

WHAT IS A UNICORN COMPANY?

• Who Are They?
• How Are They Valuated?
• What’s Expected Of Them?
• How Are They Perceived? 

Unicorn is a term used in the venture funds industry to indicate a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion and usually no more than 10 years old. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures. 

At that stage, there were only 39 companies that were considered to be unicorns. She looked at software startups founded in the 2000s and estimated that only 0.07% of them ever reach $1 billion valuations. She noted startups that managed to reach the $1 billion mark, are so rare that finding one is as difficult as finding a mythical unicorn.

According to Lee, the first unicorn companies were founded in the 1990s with Alphabet (GOOG) or Google as it is now called, being the super-unicorn of the group with a valuation of over $100 billion. Many more unicorns came along in the 2000s with Facebook being at the top of the list and classed as the only super-unicorn for that decade.

Categorizing these companies have evolved and the terms used now are, Decacorn which is for those companies over $10 billion, while Hectocorn is used for such a company that valued over $100 billion.

Since Lee’s publication, the term unicorn, is widely used and refers to startups in the technology, mobile, and information technology sectors and usually integrates all three, questionably supported by their fundamental finances.  

 

Average Life Of A Unicorn 

According to Google, there were 465 unicorns as of April 2020. The largest unicorns included Ant Financial, Didi, Airbnb, Stripe, and Palantir Technologies. The most recent Decacorn is Lyft which became a public company on March 29, 2019. Generally, these billion-dollar valued unicorns become a public company or are bought out or merged with another successful public company. 

In 1999 the average life of a company was 4 years before it went public. Now that has been stretched out to 11 years before a venture-supported technology company is listed. This is brought about by an increased amount of private capital available to unicorns, along with the increase of the number of shareholders a company can have before it is required to disclose its financials publicly. Notably, private investors can only take a position on unicorns when they choose to list.

 

No Need For An IPO

Through many funding rounds, companies do not need to go through an initial public offering (IPO) to obtain capital or a higher valuation as they can just go back to their investors for more capital. IPOs also run the risk of devaluation of a company if the public market thinks a company is worth less than its investors. 

Just two examples of this situation were Square, best known for its mobile payments and financial services business, and Trivago, a popular German hotel search engine, both of which were priced below their initial offer prices by the market. 

This was because of the severe over-valuation of both companies in the private market by investors and venture capital firms. The market did not agree with both companies' valuations, which in turn, dropped the price of each stock from their initial IPO range.

 

Where And Who Are The Unicorns?

Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: China (125), United States (124), India (27), South Korea (11), UK (10), Israel (7), Sweden (6), Indonesia (6), Singapore (4), France (3), Hong Kong (3), Portugal (3), Switzerland (3), Australia (2), Estonia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Ukraine (2), and fourteen other countries (1 each). 

The Top 10 Unicorn companies are listed in this image below

Former Unicorns 

Below are the top 10 unicorns that exited due to an IPO or Acquisitions

Click the link to view the full list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_companies
NOTE: The companies in red on this list do not have a website. 

 

The Valuation Of A Unicorn

The valuation of a startup company to be classed as a unicorn is unique in comparison to more established companies. For an established company, the valuation stems from past years’ performance, while a startup valuation is derived from its growth opportunities and expected development, so there is no actual math to estimate startups’ valuations. 

Valuations for unicorns usually come from funding rounds of large venture capital firms. To give such high valuations in funding rounds, venture capital firms have to believe in the vision of both the entrepreneur and the company as a whole. They have to believe the company can evolve from its unstable, uncertain present standing into a company that can generate and sustain moderate growth in the future. This approach can backfire as it did when it hurt Softbank, a leading investor in WeWork who took a $4.6 billion hit when the company failed to float in 2019. 

A very significant final valuation of startups is when a much larger company buys out a company and gives them that unicorn valuation. For example when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.

Bill Gurley, a partner at venture capital firm Benchmark predicted in March 2015 and earlier that the rapid increase in the number of unicorns may "have moved into a world that is both speculative and unsustainable", that will leave in its wake what he terms "dead unicorns". Also, he said that the main reason for Unicorns' valuation is the "excessive amount of money" available for them. 

Similarly, in 2015 William Danoff who manages the Fidelity Contrafund said unicorns might be "going to lose a bit of luster" due to their more frequent occurrence and several cases of their stock price being devalued. Research by Stanford professors published in 2018 suggests that unicorns are overvalued by an average of 48%. 

 

It’s In The Numbers

Businesses on the internet have made great headway. Some of the biggest businesses in the world, including Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple, are solidly established in the online tech world. A lot of other companies also have large, tangible revenue growth and earnings. They don’t buy users or customers with the hope of making money considering the inevitable attrition rate when those users eventually change their behavior. 

So valuations shouldn’t depend on imaginary future earnings but on actual returns and EBITDA. (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) Amortization being affiliate fees or payments of an obligation of a series of installments or transfers. 

Some argue that venture investors are getting over-enthusiastic when pricing businesses, inflating the price of startups that should be valued in the millions, not billions. Instead of carrying out proper risk analysis, they are diving in out of a fear of missing out on the supposedly next big thing.

 

Path To Profitability – The New Watchword

Silicon Valley’s crop of highly valued tech start-ups, which include Uber and Airbnb, now household names, all benefited from the mass adoption of smartphones and cheap cloud computing. Many of these companies built global empires by simply taking existing businesses, like taxis, food delivery, hotels, etc, and making them mobile, based online. 

Now we are seeing the likes of robotics and Artificial intelligence (AI) startups wanting to be a contender for the next big thing in unicorns. However, growth at all costs has gone out the window after years of IPOs being done without much focus on profits. “Path to profitability” is the new watchword according to Ryan Dzierniejko of Sequoia along with Michael Moritz, another Sequoia partner who says  “The law of economic gravity has returned as it does every decade or so”.

 

There are a considerable number of unicorn companies and the valuations seem to grow beyond the imagination of anyone. Is this the tech bubble 2.0?

 

The Unicorn Reality Check

Even before it was declared a global state of emergency due to COVID-19 on March 13, 2020, the unicorn reality check was underway with venture capitalists reckoning that a third of American unicorns would thrive, a third would disappoint and a third would be subject to an acquisition or die. Some are calling it the next dotcom bubble which burst 20 years ago with the advent of the internet and others are more optimistic. Either way, startup pastures that emerge in the aftermath of this economic upheaval will look very different. 

The past decade saw huge sums of money from sovereign-wealth funds, also mutual and hedge funds pour in, either directly or via VC firms into startups that were unicorns or at the very least their backers believed they might be soon. 

The jubilation began to diminish last year in May 2019, with Uber’s downturn of $43 billion, down more than a third of what it was on its first day of trading. Then, in October, WeWork, a “techie” office-rental group, scrapped its IPO after it became clear that investors had no appetite for shares in a firm that lost as much money as it generated in revenues. Its valuation was cut from $47bn to less than $8bn.

However, for Airbnb, a home-sharing website will bounce back from seeing bookings fall by 40% as the pandemic restricted travel and a possible delay of its IPO, (which was expected to be this year’s biggest) because, despite its losses of late, it is well managed and cash-rich. It also has an unmatched global reach and is likely to be back on track, making money once people are free to travel.

UNICORN – The New Buzzword In Marketing

Unicorns have come a long way since Aileen Lee coined the term in 2013, to convey wonder and rarity. Nowadays every startup wants to be one, for bragging rights and to hire the cleverest coders. Some are portraying themselves to be the next super unicorn to impress and lead potential users, consumers, and possibly victims into believing that the company is positioned to reach great heights and needless to say, using the term completely out of context. 

 “For millennials and Gen Zs being a unicorn became a filter,” says Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, a unicorn company that offers online learning courses and university degree programs.

 A small Austin-based scooter startup called itself, simply, Unicorn. It was said to be an attempt to leverage the popularized name and what it stood for, as on a psychological level, people will tend to gravitate towards what they believe identifies as successful. The outcome? It subsequently failed when the firm went bust in December of 2019, after spending all its cash on Google and Facebook ads.

Artificial intelligence is a very generic term and used by many different industries for various use-cases, however, AI is being used in a way that is basically unchained and they’re not making smart decisions about it. It’s heading into areas that people don’t know about, giving it too much power and control and will ultimately get burned. It’s all about competition and the race to see who will create the best AI for any given industry.   

Too many unicorns rest on shaky and opaque financial structures that may exaggerate their lofty valuations. These include “not-so-techy” capital-intensive firms such as WeWork, where accommodating more customers means leasing more physical office space. 

Also, direct-to-consumer retailers such as Casper, which sell flashy bedding. The co-founder, Neil Parikh declared in 2016 that, “We consider ourselves a tech company first,” Stock Market investors considered it a mattress retailer. In February it listed at $575m, less than half its $1.1bn private valuation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in marketing is more about automating simple tasks that allow us to free up more of our time to be strategic, effective, and less repetitive. It’s about improving processes while still keeping that human touch with customers and prospects. So you could say it’s automated intelligence. Some companies are taking it to the extreme with hype boasting they are first and foremost a tech company, and completely AI-based, but it is simply to generate a buzz.

 

 

The Next Unicorn

In terms of the next unicorn Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, a big VC firm, offers an alternative rule of thumb. For a unicorn to count as genuinely “tech”, and therefore profitably scalable, its actual product must be technology, he says, “it can’t just be using technology.” 
Businesses selling physical goods or services and startups offering online solutions with an already established market without proprietary technology often don’t make the cut. 

As it stands now, even viable listings are on ice until the markets’ pandemic fever breaks. In the interim, the unicorn sphere is talking about consolidating. Softbank reportedly wants Uber Eats and Door Dash to merge. In the USA, Uber may try to charm Lyft into merging, whose share price has fallen faster than its own.

There is no magic formula for identifying the next unicorn company and only time will tell us whether the unicorn boom is a bubble or not. If today’s big startups go on to secure significant profits for their investors, they’ll be looked back on as a smart opportunity well taken. If they go the way of WeWork, then the unicorn boom will be remembered alongside the dotcom bubble as an example of investor folly.

 

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

CRYPTOCURRENCY SPARKING A WAVE OF GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION

The future of finance is being redefined as cryptocurrency is becoming a thriving ecosystem, quietly encroaching on the territory of traditional finance institutions’. 

Over the last five years, Bitcoin users and transactions have averaged a growth rate of nearly 60% per year. Similarly, private and public investors have deepened their commitment to cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, Ripple (XRP), Stellar, and the upcoming Markethive Coin (MHV) along with a number of other cryptos across different sectors of the industry.

We are most definitely heading towards decentralized communities. Countries all over the world are taking notice of cryptocurrencies, particularly the countries that have suffered hyperinflation. One prime example is that of Venezuela, where inflation soared, trust in the national government policy, and currency plummeted led to a rise in the interest of cryptocurrencies.

 

Cryptography Begets Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency has erupted into a $200 billion industry, sparking a wave of what is seen as a global disruption, however, in many ways a savior in this world of oppression and the autocratic system that society has been subject to. 

There is a rich history of innovation at the heart of cryptocurrency and blockchain. One of the core elements being cryptography and dates back to ancient times of nearly 4000 years ago in Egyptian and Mesopotamian writings only to enhance its linguistic appeal. 

Cryptography has been used throughout the course of history and evolved into being used to protect sensitive information with analog cryptography used in WW2. The science of cryptography continued to advance progressively throughout the centuries. It’s come a long way since then and as long as there is a need to protect sensitive data cryptography will continue to advance. 

Beginning in 1990, an entirely new form of cryptography, dubbed quantum cryptography, was under development by computer scientists hoping to once again elevate the level of protection offered by modern encryption.

Then came cryptographic techniques used to make cryptocurrencies possible. Cryptocurrencies leverage several advanced cryptographic techniques, including hash functions, public-key cryptography, and digital signatures. These techniques are used primarily to ensure the security of data stored on blockchains and to authenticate transactions.

 

 

Since then, a series of key events have continued to shape the sector

 

Now, there are over 5,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation, some will stagnate and peter out and others will soar as they are built on innovative applications and have real use-cases giving rise to a rapidly evolving ecosystem.

 

The infographic below displays a cross-section of cryptocurrencies, stakeholders, and core applications across a sector that’s continuing to grow more important as we see the economic climate change dramatically.

 

Setting The Stage For The Bigger Picture

As cryptocurrency and blockchain technology continues to gain momentum, its longer-term ramifications will be a focal point. Essentially, its cryptographic foundation sets the stage for future developments in a financial economy.

• Privacy

Anonymized transactions protect users’ data through cryptographic techniques.

• Access

Providing a new financial model for 1.7B unbanked individuals around the world.

• Efficiency

Steep reductions in settlement time and efficacy could save consumers $16 billion annually.

• Security

Providing immutable, traceable records of security-rich transactional networks.

• Programmable Money

Smart contracts could drastically eliminate manual and administrative work⁠, ultimately bypassing them altogether.

 

The Practical Advantages Of Cryptocurrencies

The cryptocurrencies of today go beyond just replacing cash. This new token-based economy is evolving, with unique solutions emerging in finance, security, identification, social engagement, the marketplace, digital media, and ownership. Cryptocurrencies are adding both value and utility to the digital economy, and to the global financial market as a whole.

• Payments

Digital cash can be used for both ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers for purchasing goods without the need for a trusted third party. 

• Store of value

A new form of scarce native currency and a means of settlement.

• Global Transactions

Borderless money that enables easy conversion between currencies.

• Stablecoins

Crypto version of fiat which is tied to the value of resources like gold or the U.S. dollar.

• Digital ownership

Digital handling, storage, and monetization of data.

• Alternative finance

Digital assets such as collectibles, commodities, and tokenized securities

• Decentralized utilities

Crypto-enabled networks, products, and services that exchange between assets.

 

Four Projects Set To Rock The Landscape

Cryptocurrency and blockchain offer cutting-edge advances that are diverse and transformative. These are just a few of the ways cryptocurrencies are breaking down barriers for people and companies worldwide, allowing them to grow personal wealth and enter the global market.

SPEDN auto-converts crypto to fiat for merchants, reducing exchange rate risk while offering convenient customer payment options. SPEDN makes it possible to spend Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies without needing to cash out to fiat currency or load a plastic card.
 SPEDN currently supports Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the Gemini dollar (GUSD), and Zcash (ZEC), with many more coins coming soon.

 

ECOSC is a Malta-based company and has designed a platform using blockchain technology to embrace the oil and gas minerals and all products for trade. It is a global, decentralized supply chain management solution that aligns stakeholders, vendors, and buyers with the strategic management of supply and demand outcomes with cryptocurrency assets. 

ECOSC will reduce the risk of human error, counterfeiting, and fraud. It means less time will be spent processing documents and reconciling, which will increase the transaction process speed.

 

Blockchain Foundry provides custom blockchain consulting, development, and integration solutions that help leverage blockchain technologies. This firm targets governments and enterprises in need of customized blockchain solutions. 

Blockchain Foundry’s mission is to disrupt markets by leveraging the potential of blockchain technology. It eliminates middlemen, clearinghouses, and other mechanisms that can lead to errors, security breaches, or negatively affect your bottom line.

 

MARKETHIVE Market Network incorporates social media, digital media, ecommerce, ewallet, and inbound marketing that enables entrepreneurs, business professionals, commercial artists, etc, to utilize a blockchain-driven state of the art platform that encompasses every aspect of inbound marketing and social media engagement where it rewards all users’ activity with MHV and allowing all users’ to prosper on many levels. 

With the ability to take advantage of the many cottage industries within the ecosystem brings financial sovereignty, privacy, autonomy to every individual with a genuine opportunity to be in control of your future with peace of mind and set to champion the social media and internet marketing industry. 

 

The Blockchain Crypto Industry Is Expanding 

Worldwide, the numbers show that blockchain-based technology and cryptocurrency use is growing. Blockchain wallet users rose from nearly 9 million in 2016 to over 47 million recorded in March 2020.

Only 100 decentralized apps (DApps) were produced by developers in 2015. with that number skyrocketing to over 3,118 by 2020.

Overall, cryptocurrencies are helping to create an innovative and accessible financial system around the world giving back freedom and autonomy to the community at large. 

 

“Cryptocurrency deserves an opportunity to find a sustainable future in our economy.”
                                                                                     Adena Friedman, President & CEO of NASDAQ

 

While the future of the new cryptocurrency economy is still taking shape, one thing is for sure, cryptocurrencies are infinitely changing the way we view and measure the value of money.

Grounded in decentralized and autonomous systems, cryptocurrencies are having an unprecedented effect in the financial world. Ultimately, cryptocurrencies will help to transform finance as we know it, delivering a slew of investment opportunities across the global economy and a more secure, autonomous way to engage and conduct business online. 

 

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

CRYPTO AD NETWORKS
Overcoming The Adversities Of A Nascent Industry

The cryptocurrency sphere is no longer considered a craze only supported and bolstered up by tech geeks and anarchists. Cryptocurrencies have become a whole new financial class by themselves and Blockchain technology is at the forefront as we move into a new world where the recent events have seen complete economic chaos and we are now recession-bound on a global scale. 

Whether it’s a mining collective, a crypto exchange, an ICO or ILP with a specific use case,  or plain old marketing – inbound, affiliate, referral, the whole gamut, a myriad of opportunities has opened up for companies, and the individual, that is focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, in order to create an ecosystem of self-sovereignty, financial and otherwise, along with transparency, and a trustless environment where society isn’t at the behest of the powers-that-be.    

However, getting the word out to the people en-masse has been inhibited and a hindrance to this emerging industry which is a concern to the advertising and marketing of the blockchain and crypto businesses.

  
Advertising Network Adversities

Traditional ad networks and social media giants like Google, Facebook, Youtube, et al have either outright banned any type of advertising/marketing content relating to crypto, or have placed unreasonable conditions such as requiring a license from a governmental authority. 

Also, their policies could change in the blink of an eye without any warning, such as YouTube banning cryptocurrency channels, or Facebook’s constant run-ins with blockchain ads.  
                                                                         
And even if you somehow do find a way to run crypto ads, you’ll be restricted in a variety of ways that would severely impact the success and reach of your campaigns. For instance, 

• Everything is dependent on whims and fancies of the network, and its changing policies towards crypto. 
• Little to no targeting options on the audience you seek to engage
• The requirement to share a lot of personal information.
• Campaigns will be put under stricter scrutiny, and go through a longer review period
• Restrictions on the type of payment methods you can employ
• Limited number/type of websites where you can advertise

Furthermore, as technology keeps evolving, it is crucial for businesses in the sector to keep pace and grow along with it. This is why it’s become vital for advertisers, and publishers, to seek out alternatives. 

A Real Need For Cryptocurrency Ad Networks

Cryptocurrency ad networks are niche online advertising platforms connecting advertisers and publishers who share a common objective of promoting cryptocurrency marketing campaigns. Like with any other ad network, publishers offer their ad space and advertisers pay to use that. 

Crypto ad networks offer a myriad of benefits, such as:

• Connecting predominantly with advertisers and publishers from the Crypto sphere. 
• Multiple ad options like banner ads, sponsored articles, press releases and more          
• Targeted audience of a younger generation and people already interested in crypto 
• A requirement of little to no personal information
• Faster campaign approval process.
• Custom-designed crypto banners
• Dedicated customer support 
• Cryptocurrency payment methods

 

 Below are 3 prominent Cryptocurrency Ad Networks helping the industry grow. 

COINBOUND

While Coinbound’s ad network is one of the newer entrants in the field, the company backing it is a renowned name in the crypto marketing world that manages marketing for top cryptocurrency companies. Coinbound offers prime personalized services with a high degree of flexibility and one of the lowest CPMs of all networks.

• Geo-targeting of the audience with specific interests, and other demographic data.
• Multiple display ad-options.
• Connecting only high-quality publishers, and advertisers in the crypto industry.
• Free crypto banner Ad designs by an award-winning in-house design team.
• Low CPM rates with high conversion and click-through rates.
• Ability to target audience for specific sites and pages.
• 24/7 support.
• Press release issues and accessibility across top media publishers. 
• Alexa Rank 248,912 at the time of this publication.

 

COINZILLA

Another ad network making its mark is Coinzilla. It was founded in 2016 and has strict rules regarding the quality of websites and content used in its network. It currently promotes over 200 brands with 500 publishers in its ranks. 

• Multiple advertising options such as native advertising, CPM, pop-up/under, etc.
• Only high-quality websites, older than 3 months, with optimal site speed and Alexa rankings.
• Strict adherence to rules on ads, with instant bans to faucets, giveaways, false promises, etc.
• Allows casinos, ICOs, exchange promotions, affiliates, etc.
• Alexa Rank 27,739 at the time of this publication.

 

MARKETHIVE

To add to the mix we now have a decentralized option, and that is exactly where Markethive trumps the other ad networks. Taking away the middleman, the social market network connects advertisers and publishers directly to offer a transparent, cost-effective, and censorship-resistant ad platform. 

• A complete ecosystem that is free to join.
• Decentralized with delivery to multiple domains.
• Markethive blockchain capable of managing a global advertising industry and instantaneous micropayments.
• Payouts in MHV coins.
• Censorship resistant, with publisher retaining full control on what to display on their website.
• Suited for both big and smaller players due to low barriers of entry, yet safe and reliable network.
• Banner Impressions eXchange – (BIX). First of its kind where you can purchase impressions from a Markethive associate at very low CPM rates. 
• Detailed and reliable analytics.
• Alexa Rank 5,649 at the time of this publication.

 

Coming Up In Markethive… 

Markethive is making great headway to incorporating a press release and sponsored article platform as well as social newsfeed boost, newsletter sponsorship, and gamified video advertising which enables you to build powerful campaigns. These are all part of the cottage businesses within Markethive that are designed to be facilitated by the members, not the corporate body, with the purpose of generating an income for the users. 

CEO and Founder of Markethive, Thomas Prendergast is behind the scenes working tirelessly along with the engineers preparing to launch these unique platforms;

“So we have just made a major turn in our system and have a lot of work to do. A landing page to sell/buy our impressions from an exchange, to make that page a template in the Page Maker for your use, and gearing the system for the next Entrepreneur Two direction building the Press Release exchange. Producing several Press Releases to promote our new Digital Media Impressions Exchange. This is also a time for you to get a head start sharing this.”

 

A Perfect Opportunity

Markethive Entrepreneurs have a perfect opportunity right now to reach out to 3rd party sellers to meet with and discuss getting their impressions listed on their sites. Sites like the ones mentioned above. Collaboration will result in creating a monster of an ad network that will be immune to the idiosyncratic and censorship behavior of the tech giants. 

Also, in the interim and as an introductory offer in celebration to the newly launched BIX, you as Markethive Entrepreneurs have the ability to advertise your Markethive referral page and offer free banner ad impressions for joining you at Markethive.

 

The Prime Objective Of Alexa Ranking

The Alexa ranking measures traffic on any given website from subscribers and visitors that have the Alexa Extension installed. Alexa rank is a measure of website popularity. It ranks millions of websites in order of popularity, with an Alexa Rank of 1 being the most popular. 

Alexa rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site's estimated traffic and visitor engagement over the past three months. Although every website’s goal is to achieve a low Alexa ranking, it has no bearing on the number of digital impressions a site generates so there is no negative effect on banner impression sales.

Sites that have Alexa ranking like Chronicle of around 16,000, charge $66 CPM, and estimating their impressions from Worth Of Web, we can estimate they are receiving 13 million impressions per month with a potential income over $8.5 million. 

AMBcrypto has an Alexa rank of 53,893 and charges $5,500 to run a banner duration for a month. They average about 100-200 banner ads per month displayed based on IP address, time, and random rotation.

However, if you have not installed the Alexa Browser extension, please do so. It does help to give Alexa more accurate data with visitors.
https://www.alexa.com/toolbar

 

Crypto Advertising Market Growing

There are quite a few more crypto ad networks catering to the crypto sphere such as Bitmedia, Ad Shares, Cointraffic, Ad Dragon, Coin Ads, Mellow Ads, Propeller Ads and now we can add Markethive to the list with its Banner Impressions eXchange operating live now.

Markethive with its BIX Banner Impressions Exchange has created a non-fungible impressions token that is now traded in an open market assuring all purchases and set by the free market insuring you pay the right rates for advertising. You might call it free enterprise we call it a fair market for the entrepreneur from Markethive.

Conclusion

Connect with entrepreneurs, techies, crypto nerds, artists, innovators, musicians, and professional members both subscribers and traffic. You can get the first-mover advantage by advertising your product or service on Markethive and Markethive subsidiaries. The average user comes to Markethive to learn how to build an Inbound Marketing campaign, promote their services, connect with other members, and discover services to purchase.

Markethive, the complete market network on blockchain, provides a valuable inbound marketing platform, commerce portals, and a social network where users can learn, engage, expand markets, and be introduced to trusted providers. Markethive provides education, mentoring, direction, and professional services all the while earning MHV coin through its micropayment faucet system. This is just the beginning of the next-generation network built for the crypto-preneur.  

 

 

 

Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

 

Inbound Marketing Is Content Marketing – Now On Blockchain At Markethive

Useful content should be at the core of your marketing. Content is the core of Inbound Marketing

Gone are the days where content means the blog posts your company writes. Instead, content marketing now includes a diverse set of content types and multiple channels to push them through. Chances are that if you’re already using social media, then you are doing content marketing to some extent.

Content marketing is accelerating at a blistering pace. By the year 2020, roughly 1.7 MB of new content will be created every second… for every living person on earth.

It’s easy to hear statistics like that and feel a sense of overwhelm – to feel like there’s no way to make your brand stand out from the crowd. But there is and I am going to show you how with this article.

 

 

What is content marketing?

To begin with, content marketing is taking any type of content (digital or physical) and purposefully sending it out to your audience.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.

Content marketing is used by leading brands. Research shows the vast majority of marketers are using content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. It’s also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.

 

Content marketing aka “Inbound Marketing” is good for your bottom line — and your customers

Here are some key reasons and benefits for entrepreneurs and companies that use content marketing:

• More awareness

• Increased sales

• Cost savings

• Better, more loyal customers

• Greater branding and online presence

 

Content is the present – and future – of inbound marketing

Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the “relevant” and “valuable”. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” 

Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.

 

Marketing is impossible without great content

Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, inbound marketing “content” should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:

• Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.

• SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.

• PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.

• PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.

• Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.

• Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

 

What if your customers look forward to receiving your marketing? What if when they received it, via print, email, website, they spent 15, 30, 45 minutes with it? What if they anticipated it and shared it with their peers?

 

 

Markethive Blogging Platform

Markethive Blogging platforms broadcast out to huge portfolios of social networks, news sites, forums, and WordPress blogs.  Markethive blogs get easily indexed into the search engines, are subscribable by other Markethive members and subscription allows remote posting to their selection of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.  A content-rich blogging system with a reach into the millions across multiple social media and blogging platforms.

With Inbound Marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media which is exactly what you get and a whole lot more powerful tools, tutorials, mentoring, all integrated into a social network with selling platforms and exchanges. 

 

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Benefits 

Additional benefits include receiving MHV Coin by your readers which adds more value to bloggers who have increased subscriber levels. You are paid by Markethive, the system, for writing and publishing your blogs instantly and continuously. All part of the micropayment faucet system within Markethive thanks to Blockchain Technology. 

To be effective at inbound marketing (content marketing), it is essential to have an automated marketing system that embraces and enhances your marketing strategy. 

The best part is that it is free with Markethive. The Markethive Inbound Marketing System can be compared with other platforms costing as much as $2,500 per month. 

 

 

Join Markethive to learn what questions to ask and how to develop your strategy, where we deliver printed, video and live educational seminars to get you acclimated and up to speed.

 

 

 

Deb Williams

Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech.  I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

 

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