Social media influencer marketing is a global industry worth over a billion dollars as of 2018. There are thousands of influencers around the world with hundreds of thousands of followers and influencer marketing has become the top choice for many companies as a marketing tool. Patron, based out of Japan, aims to bring this phenomenon to the blockchain, establishing the first cryptocurrency influencer marketing platform.
The Patreon ICO went on for the duration of roughly two weeks, raising the whopping $40 000 000 during the duration of the crowdsale.
Patron essentially acts as a sharing economy platform for the social media users and influencers alike. It utilizes the blockchain environment and peer-to-peer connection to create a trustless infrastructure for participants in the network to build contracts. The platform helps influencers reach new audiences for their respective niche and share their content, and also helps customers by cataloguing influencers according to their desired standards. Individual users will be able to subscribe for an influencer’s services, or pay for single, one-time promotions of an influencer of their choice. Patron is fully transparent and all the details about the influencer’s social media following as well as pricing are available. Vice-versa, influencers will be able to see buyer candidacies sorted by the highest price.
The platform’s native token is an open-source cryptocurrency called the PATRON COIN(PAT). PAT is the common currency and is used for various services and is based on the Ethereum blockchain. The token helps eliminate the need of middlemen and cuts down on costs by scrapping commissions which translates to lower fees for both influencers and regular users.
To start off, Patron has probably the worst whitepaper in the history of cryptocurrency. The document is full of basic spelling mistakes like “bit coin”, “instagramor” and many other else. It’s also full of basic grammar mistakes and generally sounds like it was written from someone who only started learning English a couple of months prior, absolutely unacceptable for a $40 million dollar ICO. Also, a red flag to take into consideration is that they’re putting way too heavy emphasis on the fact that they’re based out of Japan to make them sound more reputable.
Overall, Patron is a decent project, they already have a working beta and a catalog of influencers, mainly based out of japan, but the product is there and you can pay for their services. They also have a ton of media coverage and one of their team members even has an interview for a NASDAQ segment, so generally, Patron is definitely a project we’ll look forward to hearing from in the future.
