This week, as Token2049 kicked off in Singapore, a crypto YouTuber going by “Professor Crypto” proudly announced he had received the Best Content Creator award at something called theKOL stands for “Key Opinion Leader,” a term used in marketing for hiring influencers in a particular niche market, and that’s been a controversial strategy for growing crypto.
KOLs represent a breakdown of coordination: between influencers and their audiences, and more importantly, between influencers and the entire industry Journalists broadly depend on readers for revenue, so their business goal is to produce high-quality, trustworthy information. To support that goal, news organizations are generally very careful to insulate reporters from financial details, like who’s buying ads. That information could influence their coverage to be more positive, or more negative, than the facts support.
That’s the real core of the KOL misdirect – audiences think they’re getting objective advice from experts. But what they’re really getting is an advertisement disguised as journalism. And that’s where the trouble really starts.In the Ethereum space, we talk a lot about crypto as a coordination tool – specifically, as a way to coordinate people to work towards shared goals.
It’s understandable that projects are individually motivated to pay KOLs to say only nice things about *their* project. But the end result is that everyone is just paying to have nice things said about them – and nobody is telling the plain truth.