Reaching through the looking glass
Layer 3 and Spindl are partnering
First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
and What Alice Found ThereToday we’re announcing a partnership with questing platform Layer 3. A measurement platform like Spindl working actively with a publisher is a bit strange in traditional marketing, but this is part of some new, powerful Web 3 weirdness.
The traditional way Web 2 marketers think about the world—how we first built Spindl—assumes a very basic setup: an advertiser or developer is measuring where users came from and how well they monetized and how long they stuck around. It’s a view looking up from the bottom of the ‘marketing funnel’ and toward the ‘top of funnel’ of Twitter, Google, Discord, and whatever other pixelated touchpoint represents the start of the user march toward your app.
Much to our surprise, that’s not how Spindl is being used.
A large fraction of our user base is not just an app trying to figure out if Twitter works better than Discord for user growth: it’s publishers themselves looking the other way—down the marketing funnel—at the value they’re driving downstream to NFT creators, marketplaces of various flavors, and protocols.
This violates all laws of regular media physics; it’s as if gravity were suddenly a repellant rather than an attractive force. At Facebook it would have been hard to measure how much impact Facebook was having on say Walmart’s revenue, even with an onerous direct integration. To do so permissionlessly would have been inconceivable: the architecture of the Internet simply doesn’t allow for it.
Yet, we routinely do this now for Spindl’s clients, many of them questing platforms or NFT aggregators or chains, who want to know who’s implicitly dependent on the users they’re bringing onchain.
Once you start wiring the publisher to the advertiser, all sorts of interesting questions arise:
Why isn’t that NFT collection paying me for driving buyers their way?
If users are discovering this game on my platform, shouldn’t I be getting a cut of that user revenue?
Conversely, if I notice that most of my users are also using some other onchain protocol, shouldn’t I be able to increase that flow of users by paying that upstream app to nudge those high-propensity users my way?
This is the user-growth flywheel that paid for the first Internet; something very much like it will pay for Web 3 consumer as well.
One of the most active partners we’ve worked with is Layer 3, a questing platform that lets developers engage with users by offering them tiered rewards for onboarding to an app. Quests have proven an effective way to drive user engagement; we’ve measured a number of them, both as a standalone campaign for a given app, and as part of Base’s launch.
One of the key challenges of Web 3 is managing fragmented identity between the Web 2 side of browsers and devices and the onchain side of ever-changing wallets. One major advantage of questing platforms, and something that positions them very favorably relative to regular media, is that they’re almost all wallet-aware. Most quest platforms require a wallet sign-in to avoid farming (doing quests only to gather rewards).
Thus, the technical integration between Layer 3 and Spindl doesn’t work through messy link clicks and client-side SDKs and all the hacky plumbing of Web 2; wallet events are fired from Layer 3 to Spindl and joined by Spindl to onchain events further down the funnel with 100% match rate. That’s both better for measurement, and much more native to Web 3 notions of data privacy.
As a result of this partnership, Layer 3 clients will be able to see the effectiveness of their Layer 3 campaigns as measured by an outside party, and with real attribution to boot (rather than assuming that any wallet touched was acquired by the quest). The advertiser may also expand that attribution to cover all their marketing channels if they choose. Layer 3 itself can use Spindl measurement to optimize their quests without an onerous client integration. What used to be a generally one-way flow of information from publisher to advertiser is now a two-way one in Web 3, a much more equitable arrangement.
At Spindl we’ve always thought that Web 3 marketing would evolve to be better, more transparent, and more fair than the tottering Web 2 advertising edifice we’ve lived inside for over two decades. This partnership with Layer 3 is a hint of that future.
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