To say that ICO became a buzz word in 2017 is to say nothing. The market is undergoing a rapid growth. More and more companies conduct their ICOs, collecting the amounts of money virtually on par with big-time IPOs. This development is causing the demand for ICO campaigns to rise exponentially.
This is why the stabilisation of the ICO market should be the top priority for any of the industry’s many companies. This can be accomplished by increasing the quality and the quantity of the market players. What can be expected in 2018? Let’s take a look at current trends in the ICO market.
Number of ICOs
In March 2018, since December, we saw for the first time a growth in the number of ICOs being organized. This is only for completed token sales, excluding canceled, ongoing or unsuccessful sales. As many ICO investors have probably noticed, the increasing number of the ICOs makes it extremely difficult to conduct a comprehensive research and carefully select the target for investment. Given the news on fraud ICOs and hackers’ attacks, the situation becomes even worse.
This trend highlights the importance of a proper due diligence and investment strategy for various groups of investors. It is getting increasingly important to carefully monitor the market to prevent loss of funds due to fraudulent or overvalued projects.
Combined with the established government position toward crypto currencies and token sales, this trend will lead to an increased regulation and rise of security token offerings which in its turn will pose a strong entry barrier for unsophisticated investors. Sophisticated and institutional investors will have to invest more time to identify the most promising (and profitable) investment opportunities.
Funds raised
Another important metrics to take a look at the ICO Market is funds raised by projects. The 2017 the mass awareness of ICO as an efficient mean of crowdfunding was created. The total number of funds raised in 2017 was fabulous $6,055,138,594! The total number of ICOs was 879 and given an extreme fall in BTC and alts price in the late December (from its peak at $19,762 on 17th December to $12,980 on 31st December), nothing foreshowed what happened next.
In just a bit more than 3 months the ICOs collected $3,308,634,490–55% out of 2017 results! The number of ICOs up to the moment of writing is 513 and we expect a further growth. This data shows the growing importance of ICO to the emerging projects. Despite ambiguous market signs, regulations and unstable crypto currency rates, more and more projects get involved into the game.
Marketing costs
You can do a lot of threshing water, rotate the air and shake even rocks, but the fact remains: PR ICO has become insanely expensive (for $ 30,000,000 of collected funds it takes up to 1.5 for marketing) and will be even more expensive.
Here are some estimations from one of the well known ICO agencies (for obvious reasons the name is not disclosed):
PR Online
$150,000
Launching of advertising channels
$57,950
Community Management
$5,000
Chat bot
$5,000
PR Campaign
$45,000
PR Offline
$70,000
Video production
$40,000
Adjustment of advertising channels
$17,000
Bounty Campaign
$5,000
Content marketing
$7,000
Thus, the total marketing budget — $401,950 — is not bad, is not it? The thing is that the final fees depend on professional help, but not only and even not so much marketing experts:
- First, to the great misfortune of lawyers: look at Filecoin and their thoughtful move to raise funds from the investors and everything will become clear;
- Secondly, if Bitcoin and Ether are expensive and give their interest without investing in ICO — the latter are simply useless to anyone, so the end of 2017 — the beginning of 2018 were simply terrible for many projects.
Taking into current all those trends, it can be expected that the demand for high-quality professional services will rise at this market. For all involved parties (investors, projects, the community in general) it is vitally important to approach the market maturity and elaborate common standards — something really resembling the dotcom market in the early 2000s. In this regard, ForICO aims to become an early mover in that direction.
The ForICO team welcomes any feedback, comments and suggestions via:
Website: http://ico.forico.io
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