Understanding Contest Types on JokeRace
Contest types, incentives and advantages
Contest Types
Contest Types
Voting Contest: You allowlist a few contestants to compete, and anyone can vote
Examples of voting contests include any process for mass consensus: reality TV shows, debates, persuasion games, elections, amendments, bounties, etc. You can even build entire new business models, like an onchain Product Hunt or Shark Tank. Advantages include:
Financial Incentives: Voter rewards let voters earn by voting for winning entries.
Mass monetization: voters will pay in for points, mints, and personal incentives
Incentivizing engagement: millions of people can tune in and participate at scale
Community feedback: voting contests give you fullest community consensus
Aligned incentives: contestants, voters, and contest creators can all earn
Price curves raise the cost per vote exponentially (e.g., 7.5% per minute), rewarding early voters who get greater risk and returns for voting with conviction. It creates uncapped earnings, rewards conviction, incentivizes early liquidity that draws more players to vote, and enhances the drama of the game.
Anyone Can Play: Anyone can enter, and anyone can vote
For maximum engagement, let anyone enter and anyone vote. You can also supercharge engagement by building a tournament over weeks:
Bracket tournament: daily one-on-ones, with winners facing off against winners
Elimination rounds: Survivor-style as lowest-ranked contestant is eliminated each round
Tiering: players move to higher level contests by earning enough votes across contests.
Entry Contest: Anyone can enter, and you allowlist a jury to vote
Examples of entry contests include any process of high-quality curation: grants rounds, hackathons, applications, ideathons, writing-athons, poetry awards, art contests, giveaways, “best meme/tweet/essay” contests, etc. Advantages include:
Incentivizing quality: entries have to be top-quality to earn votes, points, or rewards
Tracking reputation: each vote from a jury attests that the contributor was valuable
Understanding power users: explore valuable contributors’ onchain behavior and tastes
Marketing opportunities: users create marketing materials like tweets, memes, etc.
Meaningful rewards: votes for valuable entries enable meaningful points, airdrops, etc.
Three Types of Incentives
Reputational Incentives (lowest priority):
Reputational incentives are key incentives for contestants—and occasionally voters as well. The simplest way to understand this? Every vote is an attestation that the voter liked what they voted for. That’s an onchain attestation both about the quality of the entry as well as the taste of the voter—and long-term, that data could be leveraged for everything from ads to social matches. Contestants can build an onchain resume based on the votes they’ve gotten, and you can use contests to measure the impact and value of members of your community—the more votes they get over time, the more valuable. Contestants might be able to leverage that reputation for everything from job opportunities to airdrops to inviting superfans to join their community. And voters might get exclusive access and opportunities based on their votes.
The benefit of reputational incentives is that they’re guaranteed: even if you “lose” a contest but earn even a single vote, you’ve built your onchain resume. The downside is that the benefits might be less immediate. For this reason, we highly encourage marketing your contest as leaderboard and gallery of user-generated content that anyone can share online, so you can help players get that ultimate form of reputation: attention.
Social Incentives (middle priority):
Almost inevitably, the ultimate success of nearly every contest comes down to one factor: tribalism. A contest without tribalism is like a soccer match with one team. It doesn’t matter how hard you market it: you need players and teams to compete who are bought-in and will invite their community to come and support them. Get buy-in from contestants in advance. Make a groupchat for everyone to join. Encourage contestants to support their voters. Let them know they can and should feud publicly to give each other attention. And as long as everyone is having fun competing, and gets attention, the money they came for won’t even matter.
Financial Incentives (highest priority):
Financial incentives are the strongest incentive to make people pay attention. They’re especially powerful for acquisition—whether it’s new users, votes, or attention. And now with voter rewards, you can reward not just contestants, but voters too. Even if you can’t fund a rewards pool for winners, you can turn on self-funding rewards, where 90% of every vote goes into the rewards pool. This is key: we make it free for you to offer financial incentives. Financial incentives create a flywheel: more players means bigger rewards means more incentive to bring others in. And with price curves, earlier voters can take on higher risk:returns by voting with conviction, providing liquidity that draws others to follow on and play.
Voting Contests for Community Engagement
The key to massive community engagement (and monetization) is voting contests—particularly anyone-can-vote contests where a few contestants compete against each other for the votes of anyone watching. Imagine American Idol or The Bachelor onchain—or EigenLayer pitting 8 potential partners against each other. These are powerful ways to let anyone participate while creating a fun, gamified experience to showcase talent and community. Voting contests become exponentially more engaging with price curves, incentivizing early strategic participation, dramatically boosting monetization, and enhancing community excitement.
Integrations
Let the market decide which projects you integrate by inviting them to compete. Whichever community buys the most votes will win, earning you profit and the strongest possible partner. (See Skate altVMs contest)
Awards
By letting talent vote for other top talent, contests can incentivize top devs, designers, artists, researchers, analyst, etc to develop onchain resumes by earning votes as attestations.
Demo Days
After a hackathon, the top builders can compete in a demo day where they show off their work for anyone to watch and vote on their favorites—effectively creating a kind of Shark Tank where voters can even earn points from supporting early projects. (See: Lens’ $50k holiday hackathon with follow-up demo day)
Live Music and Comedy
Karaoke challenges, rap feuds, and roasts, standup comedy shows, remix contests can all be held live for viewers to vote on their favorite figures to earn rewards from voting fees.
Debate Tournaments
An entire NBA-for-debates could be implemented by letting figures debate each other while rewarding voters for choosing who won. The winners could then debate one another as well in escalating brackets with higher and higher rewards—all fully monetizable. (See: Bankless’ eth/sol debate & ShapeShift’s Wallet Wars).
Reality TV Shows
Any kind of reality TV show could be run through JokeRace for viewers to earn by voting on the winners. At scale, this exponentially increases the revenue for these shows.
Team Games
In its most creative form, contests could let teams vote internally to decide which teammates are killed off from the team on a regular basis—creating team-building paranoia games where the audience becomes the player, a la Crypto: The Game.
Entry Contests for Community Contributions
While mass engagement and monetization typically results from letting anyone vote, you can also curate quality results with a jury—or even increase voting engagement by inviting projects to enter who will then campaign for themselves to win. In either case, focusing on original entries can be crucial for producing a contest page that people want to look at and engage.
Onchain Product Hunt
Products can compete weekly in different categories for viewers to vote on their favorites to earn awards—giving the products visibility and enabling a fully monetizable business. Let anyone enter (for a charge) and vote with a self-funding rewards pool, and projects will be incentivized to get as many votes as possible to earn more—while preventing any botting.
Meme, Tweet, Mascot, and Art Contests
One of the most popular use cases for marketing campaigns is to create a contest where the community is invited to generate memes, tweets, mascots, and art. Besides inviting community engagement and gauging their preferences, these contests can serve as ways to track and reward top community members while incentivizing free marketing across social media.
Remix Contests
Invite fans to remix artist tracks so that they're distributing the artist to their own network—and both are building up each other's career. Fans can also use the contest to build their own onchain reputation (in the form of votes they get), as well as get the opportunity to be heard and even cocreate a major track with a favorite artist. As in the most successful contests, the contestants themselves will help provide the marketing.
Cocreation Contests
In a world of fan fiction, fans can enter contests to create new characters, generate new storylines, design new tools, write new music, etc that could become canonical IP. As these are activities they already do, contests add financial incentives and rewards, while gamifying the process—and most importantly, letting them claim full onchain provenance and IP for their work.
Curating Canon
Let fans vote on which characters, plotlines, relationships, music, artists, etc will be featured in a new production. In this case fans curate each other’s work to decide which gets elevated to canon—enabling fully fan-built universes where fans all get IP.
Pulse Checks and User Feedback
Communities can run pulse checks to get feedback from users, both on live calls as well as in ongoing contests. With proper rewards, they can incentivize users from all walks of the web to consider their project deeply, share opinions, and campaign for them as well.