Data Analysis: How XEN became an Internet celebrity overnight

XEN became famous overnight through a combination of promotional methods such as Youtuber videos and creating topics.

Source: foresightnews

Author: WhoKnows DAO

XEN Crypto was probably the most discussed project last week. When the whole network was discussing "XEN's minting caused Ethereum's gas to surge", as marketers, we were more concerned about how XEN became popular. I suddenly had an idea to dig into the XEN project from the perspective of traffic and data to see if it could provide some inspiration for Web 3 marketers who are exploring together and decode the traffic path behind the project's popularity. Therefore, this article will start from the XEN project website and further present the project:

• Traffic overview and changing trends

• Visitors and geographical distribution characteristics

• Traffic structure and traffic source analysis

• Some possible factors that may trigger the project

Traffic Overview

XEN Crypto Information Station

As of October 14, 2022, https://www.xencrypto.io/ has generated 178,000 visits. From the perspective of traffic change trends, the first peak before the official sale of the project occurred around September 27, and the second peak occurred around October 5. The first peak after the release was on October 8 when the project was officially released, and the second peak was on the 12th (affected by the Attack rumors).

From the perspective of traffic sources, mobile traffic was the main source before the project was officially launched. After the project was released, the proportion of PC traffic continued to increase, and mobile and PC traffic were distributed roughly in a ratio of 2:1.

XEN Cryto distribution station

As of October 14, 2022, https://xen.network/ has generated 984,000 visits. Judging from the traffic change trend, since it was released on the Twitter account on October 2, it has been accumulating momentum in the warm-up stage, and on October 8, the official release day, it increased sharply, reached a traffic peak on October 9, and continued to remain high for the next 1-2 days as public opinion fermented.

By comparing the traffic trend with https://www.xencrypto.io/, it can be found that the peak positions of the two sites are continuous and conductive in time. The early information main site carries most of the traffic in the preheating and new user acquisition stages, and transfers the traffic to the Mint site through internal link jumps.

From the perspective of traffic sources, unlike the https://www.xencrypto.io/ website, mobile traffic accounts for 27% and PC traffic accounts for 72%, which also reflects that for most of the current token contract operations, users still prefer to operate through PC. In terms of information acquisition, based on the continuous increase in mobile social media communication, mobile traffic has formed a monopoly on information main sites.

Geographical distribution of visiting audience

Since similarweb can only capture the access addresses of PC users, in order to better show the geographical distribution of the access audience, we further disassemble the https://xen.network/ site, which accounts for the majority of PC traffic, to look at the user demographic. There are three points worth noting:

• Poland is the most visited country in Europe, which seems to be inconsistent with our traditional perception. It also shows the potential of Web 3 in emerging countries.

• Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia and Vietnam also have obvious momentum. Singapore may not be among the top 10 due to its small population base.

• The overall page access time is more than 8 minutes, and the stickiness is really high, but on the other hand it also shows the learning cost of pages in this field.

My most intuitive feeling after seeing this demographic is that the borderless nature of Web3 and the strong vitality of emerging markets, including the rise of Poland, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries, show us that in the foreseeable Web3 competition in the next 5 to 10 years, traditional European and American countries may not necessarily take the lead. Emerging markets may bring more surprises, and these regional markets may bring more possibilities for the subsequent expansion of Web3 business.

Traffic structure

The popularity of a project is inseparable from the pull of traffic. Next, let’s take a closer look at the traffic source of https://www.xencrypto.io/ (the reason why we choose to start with this site to look at the traffic source is that from the perspective of traffic tracing, this site carries most of the traffic before and after the preheating and official release. Disassembling its traffic source can further help us restore how the traffic skyrocketed).

From the above figure, we can see that the total site traffic

• 34.48% comes from Direct, which means users visit by directly entering the URL or clicking from the webpage favorites;

• 6.85% comes from Referral, which is traffic recommended by other visited websites or site jumps;

• 23.13% comes from Social, which refers to traffic redirected from social media sites.

• 35.54% comes from Organic search, which means the traffic that jumps to the site after searching for relevant keywords through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. and clicking on the search terms;

The following will break down each traffic source one by one.

Referral traffic

The following figure further extracts the referral traffic of https://www.xencrypto.io/ according to the time dimension, and finds that the sites with referring traffic have continued to increase since October 9. As of now, the site has accumulated more than 300 external links, many of which are Crypto information sites.

The following figure further identifies the sites that played a role in driving the XEN Crypto project in the early stage of its release. We found that there are many large sites with a website weight of more than 70. Undoubtedly, these sites play an important role in the process of amplifying the volume of the entire project. On the other hand, in addition to being published on the site, the news of the website will also be published on the website's social media at the same time, which will further stimulate the spread of social media. Preliminary judgment shows that this is the primary traffic booster that led to the popularity of the XEN Crypto project after its release.

Social traffic

According to similarweb data, 58.59% of the PC traffic of https://www.xencrypto.io/ comes from Twitter, and 39% comes from YouTube. Although Twitter is undoubtedly important in the spread of Web 3, we will focus on YouTube here. Based on the capture of the keyword "XEN Cryto" on social media in the early stage of the project release (before October 8), we can even preliminarily believe that YouTube's pull during the warm-up period was the second traffic booster that made the XEN Cryto project quickly popular on the entire network as soon as the project was launched.

Although Twitter accounts for the majority of social traffic, YouTube is the platform for generating original content during the preheating phase of the project, and further disseminating it on Twitter, thereby driving dissemination. The following figure captures the keyword crawling record of "XEN Cryto" on the buzzsumo platform. It can be found that before the release date of October 8, the project team made intensive content layout on the YouTube platform, which can be understood as training for potential audiences. The following points in the content layout are worth paying attention to and learning from:

• Founder Jack Kevin interacted with multiple Crypto-focused YouTube accounts in live broadcasts. Although these accounts do not have a large number of fans, their users are accurate enough, as can be seen from the number of video views and interactions.

• Unlike regular YouTube bloggers who only make one recommendation, many accounts will treat the XEN Crypto project as a special topic. From October 1st to October 7th, they will release a series of videos, outputting content from multiple angles such as principles, gameplay, founder LIVE, Performance, etc., ensuring the depth and breadth of the content, and also achieving repeated reach of the content to potential users.

Organic Search Traffic

Regarding natural search traffic, judging from the traffic trend, a search peak is formed around the release date, and it can be preliminarily determined that this is search behavior triggered by early preheating and dissemination.

When we further break down the keywords that form user search behavior and the top visited pages on the site, we can also see some interesting phenomena. Excluding the homepage and the well-known gas consumption and official response pages to the attack, among all the blog content, the most visited pages on the site focus on explaining the game theory of XEN Cryto and its related how to pages, as well as the how to connect with metamask page.

The most intuitive feeling I have is that even if it is an issuance facing the cryptocurrency circle, we should not underestimate the learning cost of potential audiences. We need to lower all learning and cognitive thresholds low enough, and explain the how to and why from the most basic aspects. Only in this way can we attract more attention, and the audience's tendency to visit the content on the site also proves this point.

How to do founder marketing

The marketing analysis of XEN's explosion has been fully covered in the article "Behind the explosion of XEN, is it a "premeditated" operation or an accident?" Here, we will focus on the role of founder Jack Levin in the process of project promotion. In the operation of Web2 startup brands, founder marketing is a common strategy to create brand value recognition by shaping the founder's story and personality.

The XEN project does provide a great example of founder marketing in Web3. We have seen too many projects in Web3 that were initiated by big Vs but had extremely limited participation, and eventually became the harvesting grounds of the project owners (typical cases can be found in the previous NFT marketing cases: Can everything be NFT? Why did celebrity projects with hundreds of millions of fans end in failure?). In XEN Crypto, at least Jack Levin runs through the project and acts as the spokesperson for the project. Of course, more importantly, he gave the founder a clear and spreadable tag #Google21, and even laid out two special articles in the initial Twitter and Blog of the project to tell the story of the founder and his relationship with Google. Usually, in Web3 promotion, the opening tweet of the official Twitter account can best reflect the market entry strategy of the project. XEN enters the market from the perspective of the founder's story, which can also indirectly confirm the project owner's consideration in the direction of content marketing.

How to spread rumors and mysteries

Rumors and mysteries always spread the fastest and widest. The root of their lethality lies in the fact that they contain information points that can stir people's hearts and form the power of self-propagation. During the social monitoring of the XEN project, it was found that the following post was circulated on Reddit on October 7, before the project was released.

From the perspective of Reddit, this post is not widely spread, but when you search on Google, you will find that there are as many as 132,000 entries containing both "XEN" and "Satoshi Nakamoto". From the early blog content of the XEN project, it can also be seen that the project is trying to create a correlation between XEN and Satoshi Nakamoto. Maybe it is not the source of the rumor, but it may not be the one who fueled the rumor.

Takeaway for Web 3 Marketers

After reading the XEN Crypto project, are there any marketing ideas worth learning from? Here are some simple summaries:

• The PR list of the XEN Crypto project is worth learning from.

• Select YouTube bloggers to organize a series of special reports on the project to promote social media dissemination;

• The content is fully laid out and predicted to lower the entry threshold for potential audiences;

• Create topics by inserting content tags with "viral" attributes and emotional mobilization into the project, such as "Google employee No. 21" and "XEN's revival of Satoshi Nakamoto" in the XEN Crypto project, to drive discussion heat;

• Embed founder marketing into the project’s vision and storytelling to increase project endorsement and trust.