All about the #GooglyPrize

A general update and a brief review on the #GooglyEyes contest.

The #GooglyPrize has grown tremendously in the past few weeks and I am incredibly pleased to see this evolving into a seriously silly establishment on the steem blockchain. As the contest grows I feel now is a good time to improve and elaborate on it's organisation and core motives.

Let me start by giving you a recap of why and how this contest was started:

Launching the #GooglyPrize

to create engagement for a tag I was using all by myself.

I started bringing my #eyebombing hobby to steemit somewhere around May 2017. Even though I had been lurking on steemit since 2016, I had never engaged much with the community before that. Posting my #GooglyEyes was a lot of fun and I even managed to convince two fellow steemians (shoutouts to you: @okkiedot & @marty-art) to join in. But overall it was the usual plankton experience, hardly anybody saw it, upvotes were modest and engagement was close to none.

My next step was to look for every mention of googly eyes anywhere on steemit. I know many people have "a thing" for wiggly eyes and my goal was to let them know I was around and equally ecstatic about those Googlies. That's how I met @krystle. She had posted something totally unrelated but it included a googly GIF and the following sentence:

because everything is more awesome with googly eyes!

I quickly left an enthusiastic comment and without even knowing about the cash giveaway attached to the post - I had won 10 SBD just like that! The idea of creating a contest had formed in the meantime, and now I even had some additional funds to give it a little push.

That's how the first official award was funded and how @krystle involuntarily became the founding patron of this event.

Establishing the Prize and making my Mission Statement

Free money gets attention easily, but that wasn't what this was about!

My central idea for organising the contest was really just to bring life to the #GooglyEyes tag and to give fellow minnows and plankton a good way to post some original content and foster engagement in my own weird little niche on the steem blockchain. I had looked into many other contests on steemit and I came to the troubling conclusion that a lot of those were focused on their very own marketing and the profits generated for the organisers.

When running a contest on steemit, the organiser always wins!

I was eager to avoid this impression and after some discussions and research into the technicalities, I quickly developed my "100% Fair Prize Pool" strategy to give the award continuous growth over time while also making sure that all funds ever earned with curating the show would go straight back to the #GooglyEyes community.

Gaining Witness Support

The attitude and engagement this contest was able to capture didn't go unnoticed.

It started with @ausbitbank, he's @krystle's partner, so he was aware of the show from the beginning on. He immediately liked what he saw and he's been a major contributor to the prize pool almost since day 1. Soon later @reggaemuffin caught on to the show and he saw an opportunity to make this an even warmer place.

your contest is epic, it produces original content and quality one at that.
^{@reggaemuffin July 2017}

And since then both @ausbitbank and @reggaemuffin are helping me to help them to help all of you awesome googlified steemians to earn great SBD prizes and receive Steem Power delegations every week.

If you want to show your appreciation for their generous support, you can support them, too! Show your approval for witnesses that actively engage in and support the community.

>> VOTE FOR YOUR WITNESSES NOW <<

_{Witnesses maintain the steem blockchain and it is important for the health of this platform that the community exercises their power to approve good players into the ranks of the top witnesses having the most influence over the technical aspects and game rules of this ecosystem. Each steem account can approve up to 30 witnesses.}

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Enough with the History-Lesson

I'll stop praising my accomplishments and supporters now
because you probably just want to know what's changing
and especially how you can actually win this thing.

How can YOU be a #GooglyPrize Winner

The "No-Conditions-Policy" applies since Day 1. No mandatory resteems, upvotes or follows are required! To make a qualifying entry to the prize just:

• get (or make) some #GooglyEyes
• stick them onto something (digitally added eyes are not accepted)
• take a picture (or better make 2 or 3 for better proof of authenticity)
• create a post with the tag #googlyeyes
• post original content & don't spam

I had to add the fifth bullet-point during the recent growth spurt as some users started submitting several posts daily, and occasionally trying to sneak in well shared old examples from other social media sites. Don't do that!

Since the contest runs recurrently and uninterruptedly, you can submit your post at any time. New winners are selected every 7-8 days and I usually curate new entries in the #GooglyEyes category at least daily. You don't have to register your entry anywhere else, as long as you use the required tag, your entry will be considered. As soon as you receive an upvote and a resteem by @googlyeyes you'll know that I have recognised your entry.

Entering the contest has been made as easy, barrier free and accessible to anyone as possible. But winning is becoming increasingly difficult as the contest and the number of entries continues to grow. So, let me try to explain the criteria by which I select the winners:

Judging Criteria

This was started as a simple #eyebombing contest but it has become much more.

The core principles of #eyebombing as a non destructive form of street-art are still the most important criteria for making a good entry.

• The #GooglyEyes should be applied to (and remain on) an object in a public area.
• No other facial features should be added. The object should "come to life" just by adding those eyes and nothing else.
• "Eyes-on-Eyes" are discouraged. Taking objects that already have an actual face and putting the wiggle eyes over it doesn't work for #eyebombing.

Now, since not everyone lives in a city and wiggle eyes aren't always easily accessible everywhere, I am bending the rules of #eyebombing a little bit.

• The use of "proper" plastic wiggle eyes is strongly encouraged. However, self-made eyes of any kind are accepted and as long as the entry is awesome in other ways, you still have a good chance at winning.
• Your Googly doesn't necessarily have to be in a public area. Any type of object, even household appliances indoors or your latest origami creation may be accepted. I still think it's a good idea to go outside and take a walk with curious eyes looking for a funny faces, though!

If your entry isn't following the classic #eyebombing rules or if you simply want to increasing the rating of your entry in other ways, too, there's a few more things to keep in mind:

• Invent some funky names and give your Googly a quirky background story.
• Use #GooglyEyes to communicate something, this could be about yourself or a topic that you care about.
• I love GIFs, great photography and weird randomness in general.
• I admire exceptional creativity.

The #GooglyPrize is a contest not a lottery, quality always wins against quantity. And since this contest was created to build a community, I'll probably also recognise if you are actively engaging with your fellow Googlyistas.

The Prizes: SBD and SP Delegations

The #GooglyPrize awards 100% of it's post rewards on the Winner Posts.

60% of the SBD-pool are paid out immediately in each upcoming winner announcement, 40% are used to pre-fund the subsequent award (this helps smoothing out spikes and dips in post rewards). SBD prizes are awarded in three tiers of 30%, 20% and 10% of the SBD pool. Usually there will be one winner per tier, but due to exceptionally large prize pools or my own indecisiveness it may happen that multiple winners per tier are selected and the prize money then get's divided accordingly.

Additionally all SP gained through the award posts are going into a continuously growing delegation fund. During each winner announcement one of the winners will be selected to receive a delegation for one week. This selection is not related to the quality of the winner's entry but to his account data. As this part of the prize aims to further strengthen the community, the delegation gets awarded to a winner with a limited SP balance of their own and a favourably low self-voting quota.

So far the #GooglyPrize has been able to pay out a total of 408.390 SBD to all it's previous winners and on top of that has additionally accumulated a delegation fund of 216.999 SP to-date.

So What's Changing Now?

Actually, not very much!

But as the contest grows I will try to make it more independent from "whale-support", more maintainable and also more transparent.

So far 40% of the SBD-pool have always been just sitting in my wallet waiting for new winners. I will now start using this money to buy votes for the previous winners post through @minnowbooster. This should actually have a net-positive effect on the prize pool and will help to further increase both SBD and SP rewards for the contest.

It is important to me that this happens transparently, and it's probably the main reason why I am making this lengthy post today. I will start this as an experiment on the current winners post and I will give you detailed updates including full balance sheets of the prize pool in the future!

Incentivising Contributions to the Prize-Pool

In other words, making it more attractive to upvote the winner announcements.

First of all, the paid votes for the announcement post as mentioned above will be made at a minimum post age of three days. This means everyone who upvotes the post within the first 72 hours will get their proper share in curation rewards for this vote as well! I will make the first purchase for the most recent announcement in a few hours, so if you haven't voted there yet, now is the time. ;)

Second of all, I have registered @googlybot. This bot will monitor who has been upvoting the announcements and will soon start distributing small random upvotes to those contributors. Kind of like a #GooglyPrize loyalty rewards program, this bot will function similar to my other recently launched cuddle-bot @steemkitten. I still have to tweak a few things but I expect to launch @googlybot after the #GooglyPrize Issue No. 30 is out (~in 2 weeks).

Making it easy to Follow the Contest

Do you want the full flood of Googlies or just the Announcements? Yeah, you have a choice now!

If you follow @googlyeyes your feed will contain all valid entries to the contest. Now I understand that's maybe a bit much for some of you, but if you really want the full package of googlyness, that's still your channel!

And now there's also @googlyprize. This account will only resteem relevant #GooglyPrize Updates and Winner Announcements. All #GooglyPrize Posts since it's inception have been resteemed here, so the @googlyprize blog also serves as an easy access point for looking into the previous winner announcements. If you are curious, pay a visit to @googlyprize.

That's all for now

As if that wasn't enough of a wall of text already, right?!

I am @fraenk.
Stay googly my friends!

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bonus image:

_{The first GIF made with the now iconic #GooglyPrize trophy}

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everything is better with #GooglyEyes

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Roast me in the comments!

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