“Everything disappears into nothing at all.”

— Alan Watts, Zen and Meditation

I spent another 100,000 sats on a zap-vertising experiment…

And I think I proved that advertising on Nostr actually works…

Here’s:

1️⃣ What I did

2️⃣ The results

3️⃣ What I learned

1️⃣ What I did:

I sent 4105 zaps over the course of 3 days for a total of 112,000 sats.

Each zap contained a link for a blog post:

zapvertising-experiment.carrd.co

My goal was to see if I could get a reasonable cost per click (CPC)…

2️⃣ The results:

During the campaign I had a total of 71 unique visitors to the page.

CPC was 1578 sats or $1.50 usd.

I also gained 245 followers from that campaign.

These CPCs are in line with other ad platforms which validates the overall concept for me.

3️⃣ What I learned / brain dump:

- Results were better than expected.

- I thought there might have been a bit of negative push back (however none received).

- There is a chance I am significantly underreporting and google analytics isn't picking everything up (surprised to see 3-4x the number of new followers vs. clicks 🤔)

- THERE IS SOMETHING HERE. I still don’t know exactly what the model looks like, how it scales, but there is something to be uncovered.

- Right now, this can’t be done at scale… in the future it could. I spent ~$100 and it took me multiple days. In the future there will be ways to allocate +$10,000 per day here. For context of where we are at right now, Nostr daily zap totals are around 750,000 sats - about $675 - see stats.nostr.band/ for that data)

- Something feels off with the format… simply paying someone and sending them a link… The p2p model feels right, but the format feels off.

More to come 🫡

Let me know your thoughts 👇

I've been dealing with Bitcoin since pre-2013, and I've gotta say I've never seen it feel as powerful as it does on Nostr. The instant, effectively-free transactions that spring from having so many people on Lightning Addresses is like arriving on a different planet.

Most people's experience with Bitcoin payments -- if they even have it -- is a 30-60 minute wait for mining + two-plus block confirmations, and a fee that made it feel dumb to send less than $20. Most people don't want that. They don't need that. They will never care about that. Some do -- I did -- but it's a permanent minority. This is what makes lightning-fast settlements a big deal.

When normal people and businesses realize that global money transfers can be borderless, instant, free, and only take like two clicks, I think things are going to get very interesting. Still need to cover a lot of road on the privacy problem, but this already feels better than everything naked on-chain.

The hardest problem has always been making it easy for people who don't care about Bitcoin to accept Bitcoin (tender resistance) -- without requiring them to start caring about Bitcoin.

The way you do that is by making it "better than money." We're not there yet for everybody, but for the first time in many years, I caught a glimpse of how it might be possible.

It’s pretty easy to keep anonymity with Damus wallet integrations, but I agree that Primal is pretty stringent

#Nostr is already superior to Twitter/X when it comes to free speech and Bitcoin/technical knowledge.

And in time, I suspect it will surpass Twitter wrt news and wide-ranging Hegelian dialectic discourse as well.

any nostr users in the MENA region?

would love to connect

frustrated enough with nostr clients that i want to create my own

Vibes today.

I want apple-quality bitcoin / nostr hardware. Nice aluminum not crappy plastic junk.