The Noun Square Season 2 Re-Cap

art by ilustradora

The Noun Square Onchain Media Collective is one of the most committed, effective and Lindy teams ever funded by Nouns.

We have been making a meaningful impact on the community throughout Season 2, via daily Spaces, regular art contests, entertaining video content and more. Our highly engaged network of fans has produced nearly 6 Million unique content impressions so far this year on X alone.

We have responded to Nouner feedback and leaned down our operations as much as possible, shifting focus to the creation of more rich video content, including a promising new weekly video podcast called Zero Rights Reserved (YouTube)(Spotify), which has racked up over 350,000 views across our socials in just 4 months.

We've also been trailblazers when it comes to Nouns on Ethereum L2's, onboarding our community to Optimism, Zora Network and soon BASE through various initiatives and educational content.

Unique among funded Nouns projects, we raised more than 20 ETH in operations funding from non-Nouns sources so far this year, and have stretched the 6 month mandate from Prop 226 to 9+ months.

Last Season, on The Noun Square...

A Short List of Some Notable Things We Accomplished During Season 2:

We have remained steadfast in our commitment to act as a reliable daily touchpoint for the nouniverse, hosting more than 500 Noun O' Clock LIVE shows in a row without missing a single day, accumulating almost 40,000 total Spaces listens year-to-date and impressive overall engagement metrics from our X Community, including an average of 20,000 impressions, 215 Likes and 112 Re-Posts PER DAY.
After receiving Nouner feedback, we pivoted much of our team energy into creating more pieces of engaging video content like "This Week in Nouns", educational tutorials, and our new weekly video podcast Zero Rights Reserved.
We scaled back our original project scope considerably by partially sunsetting the SoapBox program and leaning down the core team to do more with less, ultimately stretching a 6 month engagement to 9+ months. We "open-sourced" the process and created a dedicated account for community spaces called TNS OpenMic (more on this below).
We have raised a total of 20+ ETH so far from outside sources towards the funding of our operations and contests via a combination of trial sponsorship collaborations with values-aligned groups, grants awards, and our daily NOMO Edition mint proceeds.
We have positioned ourselves as a vanguard of nounish activity on Ethereum L2, educating and onboarding our community to the Optimism network via NOMO, the Zora Network through our weekly podcast open editions, and soon the BASE L2 with our imminent Yellow Collective launch.

1) Continued Consistency and Community-Building + Support of Nouns-funded Projects

So far this year, we have hosted 311 consecutive Noun O' Clock LIVE X Spaces, bringing our lifetime running total to 510 straight Spaces. If you include our various other nounish Spaces as well, the total year-to-date jumps to 857 Spaces, which equates to 921 total hours on air, or a total of 38 full days of broadcasting nounish content, with a total of 37,800 cumulative listeners.

YTD stats from Superspaces.ai

On top of our daily Spaces participation, we have also seen tremendous X/Twitter timeline engagement from TNS community on our art contests, video content and other daily posts, with an impressive 5.9 Million impressions so far year to date, which equates to a per-day rate of nearly 20,000 impressions, 215 Likes and 112 Re-Posts! We've also completely organically grown our following by almost 100% to 9100 followers, which makes us the largest nounish account by follower count on X after @nounsdao and our friends at @nounsesports.

YTD stats from X.com

In addition to serving as a consistent and reliable content hub for Nouns fans, we have also strived to be a helpful media liaison to nounish subDAOs and funded Nouns projects, helping to coordinate and host Twitter/X events, Discord events and more, and generally amplify their messaging to our network.

Some examples of this kind of community support:

Supporting the "Nouns: A Movie" team by coordinating and hosting a watch party for their Episode 1 Premiere, and amplifying their various announcements and initiatives like their open casting call, etc.
Supporting the Nouns AI pod by cohosting a weekly Update Call in our Discord that was free for anyone to join and keep up to date with what that team was building, as well as general news from the AI space. (Example archive recording here.) We also produced this awesome video summarizing everything Nouns AI accomplished in 2023.
Supporting Nouns Esports by amplifying various contests and announcements, co-hosting weekly Twitter/X Spaces, and hosting a live watch party by request during their TI12 faceoff against GG.
Collaborating with Nouns Agora to host a Nouns Governance Discussion most weeks on Twitter/X Spaces with Yitong.
Supporting Brennen's Tavern project by recently moving one day per week of Noun O' Clock LIVE to tavern.fm. (Not a Nouns-funded project per se, but Brennen is a Nouner and we like the duck.)
Collaborating to support Lil Nouns DAO's The Lil Nouns Show, and producing a feature video on their funded Lil Bevs proposal (tentative release date January 2024.)
Collaborating with subDAOs such as Lil Nouns DAO, Gnars, Food Nouns, Nouns Amigos, Nouns Japan, NounsCN, Nouns BR and more to host and cohost regular spaces for their communities.

Engaging Nounish Artists and Creatives:

Our art contests have continued to be very popular in terms of engagement, and also continue to impress in terms of quality and quantity of output. Here are a couple examples of winning entries from some of our many contests this year:

Nounish Halloween Contest

TNS Anniversary Art Contest Winners

We constantly see new people tuning into our spaces and engaging with our content, asking questions about Nouns, etc. in the days following an art contest. This is part of the reason why have centred the vision of our upcoming Yellow Collective launch around funding and empowering as many nounish artists and creatives as possible (more below.)

Crowd-Sourced Auction Settling:

Speaking of art, one other way that TNS has contributed to the Nouns ecosystem this season is by making a fun daily spectacle of choosing the new Noun of the Day on Noun O' Clock LIVE.

With the help of our audience, we have settled some pretty amazing Nouns this year, including some special ones for occasions, such as a Halloween Ghost, a Birthday Cake for Aug 8, a Black Cat for Token 666, etc. Some of these aesthetic Nouns have sold at auction for above-average prices, even despite the fork dynamic. Noun 658 (Dark Factory) for example sold for 51 ETH, a full 25 ETH more than the average Noun was going for at that time.

We also challenged ourselves earlier this year to try and mint every unminted Noun head, and succeeded just prior to the 2nd Nouniversary. We then challenged ourselves again to mint all the newly added heads as quickly as possible, and succeeded in less than 2 weeks. As a result, Proposal 401 was able to award every contributing artist an existing Noun with their own created head.

Here is a small selection of the many aesthetic Nouns we have helped to mint so far this year:

2) A Fresh Focus on Video Content:

During the earliest months of this season, TNS was producing and facilitating an average of 40 Twitter/X Spaces per week for various nounish communities. We sought and received feedback from nouners and our audience, and learned that their favorite content was moreso our educational/informative video content on YouTube and TikTok, and so we decided as a team to shift our resources and attention towards increasing the production of this kind of rich media content on a more regular basis.

Since that time, we have been producing 5-8 high quality pieces of video content per month. Here are some notable examples of rich media produced by TNS this year:

This Week in Nouns Series (fka Prop Talk): A 3 minute weekly video summarizing everything exciting that's happening in Nouns, produced and hosted by the indomitable JackWyldes. Primarily an X-native release, these have received a combined 70,000+ views so far this year.

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Crypto Advocacy / Gitcoin: Nouns doesn't celebrate its wins often enough, so we decided to make a short video about our 100K donation to the Gitcoin Crypto Advocacy Round. This piece of evergreen content has received nearly 30,000 views so far since its release.

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Nouns AI approached us and asked us to produce an engaging video about everything their pod built in 2023. This was primarily an X release, but you can also watch it here on YouTube.

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Tutorials and Educational Videos About Onchain Life: Our community loves learning about Ethereum, how to use L2s, how to apply for grants, etc. and our TNS Tutorials Series helps them along that path. Our Tutorials videos have accumulated over 50,000 views this year across our socials.

[click to view playlist]

Notable Video Archives of Popular Twitter Spaces Events such as our All About that Base event featuring Jesse Pollak, this Nouns RageQuit Debate moderated by the Verbs team, this open discussion of Private Voting, this CC0 Round-table with Danny Cole and David Horvath, etc.

Zero Rights Reserved Podcast: We are 16 episodes in and growing in popularity, with over 350,000 views so far in 4 months. (More on this in the dedicated section below.)

In addition to longform video content, we have also continued to leverage our TNS TikTok Accounts to repurpose shorter versions of our videos, and platform-native shorts. We've continued to grow our English language and Brazilian Portuguese language accounts this year to a combined 38,500 followers, and have received over 150,000 views on our short videos there YTD.

Year-to-date, our video content has received over 650,000 views across our socials, with 70% of that content coming in the latter part of the Season following our renewed emphasis on video production and distribution.

3) The Zero Rights Reserved Podcast: Early Signs of Success

Zero Rights Reserved is a weekly video podcast that we launched in June as part of our renewed focus on creating more rich digital media. It is a podcast about Nouns, DAOs, Ethereum, Art and more, and our goal is to interview interesting guests from around the onchain space from a Nounish perspective, while educating and entertaining our audience and bridging gaps to other like-minded communities.

So far, the podcast has been getting extremely good feedback from listeners both inside and outside the nouns community, as well as from the guests that we have invited on:

Notable guests so far have included Jack Butcher, Deadfellaz cofounder Psych, Supriyo from Nouns Movie, Bob Burnquist, Chris and Eric from Stoopid Buddy, Cryptopunk Noah, Dan Romero, founder of Farcaster, and more.

ZEROPOD has also proven to be our most popular piece of recurring video content so far, racking up over 350K impressions across TNS socials for the first 16 episodes. Podcast subscriptions and downloads are all steadily growing, and from a human impact perspective, the initiative has been a great bridge to other values-aligned communities such as Gitcoin, Checks/Opepen, Deadfellaz, OnChainMonkey and more. We have started to see more and more people from these other communities joining Noun O' Clock LIVE regularly to learn more about Nouns after having their interest piqued by the pod!

We have also been minting each episode of ZEROPOD as a special ONCHAIN collection on Zora using the Zora L2 network. You can check them out and mint for free here.

Like all of our content at TNS, and as the name would imply, all Zero Rights Reserved conetent is fully CC0, and we have started to compile a simple repository of both raw and edited footage that anyone is free to use however they see fit. You can view the repository here.

We believe ZEROPOD has the potential to become our co-flaship production alongside Noun O' Clock LIVE. The former bringing in nouns-curious eyeballs from all over the web 3 space, while the latter acts as an effective sieve to catch artists and creatives and help them find ways to contribute meaningfully to the community.

4) A Note About Team Adaptability

As mentioned previously, in the early part of this year, TNS was managing and facilitating up to 40 Twitter Spaces per week for communities such as Gnars, Lil Nouns, Unouns, Nouns Amigos, and more via our SoapBox Program.

While we do maintain that the SoapBox program was impactful for community-building, and was certainly appreciated in many corners of the nouniverse, it also demanded a lot of labor to maintain in terms of scheduling, administration, social media messaging, hosting and coordination. As we started to receive feedback from Nouns DAO members that they did not feel SoapBox should be a primary focus for TNS, we made the difficult decision to mostly wind it down.

So as not to leave our communities in the lurch, we did the social media equivalent of making SoapBox "open source": We built a new affiliated X account called TNS OpenMic, where any nounsfolk could apply to host a show about any nounish community or topic of their choosing. We will still amplify where possible, but without the previous commitment of in-house scheduling, hosting, messaging etc. Our new vision for OpenMic is that it can act as a kind of Public Access Channel for Nouns, where anyone can show up and spin up a Space with a built-in potential audience and iterate their concept.

As a result of these and other changes to our day-to-day operations, we have been able to stretch our previous mandate of 6 months from prop 226 to 9+ months.

5) Promising Progress on Self-Funding & Alternative Funding Sources

One of our primary goals in Season 2 was to explore alternate sources of funding to become more self-sufficient as an organization, and we have explored this priority from three main angles: 1) Sponsorship collaborations, 2) Grants from other sources, and 3) Crypto Native revenue generation.

On item 1, we were able to negotiate 4 collaborations with values-aligned organizations plus a one-off video commission, for a total ETH value of 5.5 ETH. Thank you to Dawn Wallet, Gnars DAO and OnChainMonkey for being open to collaboration. We have open discussions with various other organizations and protocols as well for future month-long content sponsorship collaborations.

Secondly, we were extremely grateful to be awarded a Gitcoin Public Goods grant of 2.5 ETH for outstanding work in Web 3 Education and Onboarding, and a 5 ETH grant from Builder DAO to seed the imminently launching Yellow Collective treasury with funds to be used for nounish art contests and content commissions.

And finally, we have brought in a total of 9.14 ETH YTD from our NOMO Nouns Daily Edition mints over the course of Season 2. We have also been iterating and evolving the NOMO collection and experience to make it more accessible for our audience. This summer, we migrated the collection to the Optimism L2 to solve the problem of a $7 daily mint that was costing $50 in gas on mainnet. Recently, we also made the decision to lower the mint cost from ~$7 to ~$1 to again encourage more broad participation from our community on a daily basis.

With these four sources combined, we have so far raised 22.14 ETH in outside revenue and grants, and we hope to double this amount in Season 3.

One way that we will do that is with the launch of The Yellow Collective, a new TNS onchain club that will be deployed this month as a daily nounish auction on the BASE L2 using Nouns Builder.

6) Nouns on the OP Stack

We noticed an interesting problem when talking to our community: Many wanted to "Enjoy Ethereum", but they were fed up with paying high gas fees to do so. We decided to make it part of our mandate to teach our 50,000+ followers across socials about the benefits of using OP Stack chains, and show them exactly how to do it.

First, we migrated our daily edition collection "NOMO Nouns" from mainnet to OP, and produced some helpful tutorials on how to bridge ETH. Next, we started minting our Zero Rights Reserved podcasts as FREE mint collectibles on Zora L2 (shout out Jacob for helping us with this rollout.)

Finally, we are launching a "DAO" (onchain collective) on BASE L2 using Nouns Builder this month, called The Yellow Collective. You can learn more about our plans for this, and the BASE-deployed "Collective Nouns" daily auctions in our announcement thread here.

This diagram helps to illustrate our three-pronged strategy for educating the Nouns community about the OP Stack, and the importance of Ethereum L2s:

One of our core ideals is to help create a safe and accesible place for people from all over the world to be able to Enjoy Nouns, and we are excited to leverage these L2 initiatives to do just that.

But most of all, we're just excited for these Collective Nouns auctions to start... I mean, just look at these community-drawn traits that won our recent Prop House competition!

That's it for now! Thank you for tuning in for TNS snz 2. We appreciate this DAO and community for all the opportunities it has entrusted to us thus far. We love the concept of Propdates and, should we be engaged to continue with our important work via an upcoming proposal, we will commit to posting onchain updates like this one at least every 60 days.

Long Live Nouns! ⌐◨-◨