KnownOrigin: leading marketing for eBay’s NFT marketplace through the 2022 crash

KnownOrigin is an NFT art marketplace founded in Manchester in 2018. I worked alongside the founders on its marketing from the launch, first as their media consultant and then on and off as a consultant for four years, while running CoinJournal and founding CryptoKaiju, the first vinyl toy on the blockchain, which KnownOrigin partnered on. By the end of 2018 the platform had 47 artists, 196 artworks and just over 550 sales; by 2022 its Twitter account had 121,000 followers.

eBay acquired KnownOrigin in June 2022, and I joined eBay’s Web3 team that May as Senior Digital Marketing Lead, reporting to the Marketing Director. I led five marketers across paid and organic, and later product-managed the marketplace squad as well.

The timing was hard. In the first quarter of 2022 the site averaged 92,500 users a month. By the second quarter that had fallen 57%, and direct traffic, the people who already knew the site, had fallen 79%. Fewer artists were minting, sales fell with them, and the team was working from analytics that had only tracked purchases since September.

Six months after the strategy went in, traffic was up 30%, the conversion rate up 10%, and revenue from organic and social up 20%, with the market still falling.

What the data said

The first job was a review of 2022: every channel, every page, every conversion path. It showed that the picture the team had was wrong, not just bad.

Twitter looked like the sales channel. The creators were. Twitter drove 37.74% of purchases between September and December 2022, so the plan was to post more. But of the 7,937 Twitter sessions that went on to view a collection page, only 36 came from KnownOrigin’s own account. The sales came from artists sharing their own work. The platform’s job was to give them something worth sharing.

Promotion wasn’t selling anything. I segmented the people who read the top promotional posts and bought something. In no case was the purchase for the artist in the post: one post produced 13 purchases, none of them for its subject. The curated collections, the site’s own showcase, had 797 sessions and 9 purchases in three and a half months. The one piece of content that worked was the guide to applying as an artist: 1,467 people read it and 822 went on to the application page.

The journal and organic search weren’t educating anyone. Journal posts bounced 67% of readers and held them under three minutes. Organic search brought 18% of traffic, 10% of purchases, and converted at 1.2%, almost all of it on branded terms. The questions new buyers and sellers actually searched for, such as how to buy NFT art or what an NFT is, had no answers on the site.

Buyers took weeks, and the model gave them a day. Only 30% of buyers purchased on their first visit; 47% took between 12 and 30 days. Last-click attribution was crediting whatever they touched last, usually a tweet, and hiding the content and the creators that had done the work in between.

The activity that proved it

By the end of 2022, with eBay’s ownership prompting claims that KnownOrigin was becoming less crypto-native, follower growth had stalled and fewer creators were adding work. The answer was a run of activity built around the creators themselves.

It started with a Christmas giveaway: a 1/1 piece or a POAP from a different artist every day for a week, the artists providing the prizes and sharing the posts, with paid promotion behind them. The giveaway reached 1.27 million impressions in the week and added 1,121 followers, against a typical week of under 500. In January the Creator Contracts launch followed: artists could mint on their own contracts and build their own collections, launched through a beta, email, social, paid and an NFT Paris after-party, with another 1.17 million impressions in its first week of ads. Alongside them ran Twitter Spaces for creators (the session on marketing your NFTs drew 843 listeners), a sponsorship at Adobe MAX, and the Deadfellaz “Draw the Undead” collaboration.

Over the six months that followed, work added to the site rose 15% and sales 30% against the six months before.

What it shows

This is the work I do as a fractional head of marketing: a review that finds what the numbers are hiding, a strategy a small team can run, and measurement that holds up when the market doesn’t. The review that found all of this is what my audit and roadmap produces.

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