How Justin Sun weaponized TRON Tab to create insane engagement rates.



Samantha Zimmerman



Early in January 2019, Blockmodo decided to create 10 Crypto Tabs for the crypto community. Crypto Tabs are open source extensions for Google Chrome that allows investors to see an unprecedented view across multiple channels in realtime.

Investors see streaming price, news, social media and Reddit posts, and code checkins from developers with every new tab.

Blockmodo released TRON Tab sometime in January with little fanfare. That is until Justin Sun ran across it and promptly weaponized it.

Write more about TRON!

Most top tier publications only publish about five to six stories a day which leads to publications prioritizing which coins to write about. Usually publications like to write about regulatory or industry matters because they can be shared across different communities with minimal blowback.

With tokens publications tend to play it safe and stick with the top five coins because communities in general want them to succeed.

As you can imagine, writing about TRON is not first on any reporter's list. Typically TRON stories get traffic far below what Bitcoin or Ethereum get.

However in January, multiple publications started noticing traffic increases for TRON related stories. Suddenly, TRON stories were getting 20 to 30 percent more traffic than usual.

The source happened to be TRON Tab. Users who were installing the Tab from Reddit were clicking on stories as they were published. The resulting increase in traffic caused editorial teams to write more and more stories about TRON. This resulted in a huge halo effect that feeds more and more energy into the TRON ecosystem.

Reddit engagement adds more fuel...

Since the 2017 crash, most crypto-currency sub-reddits have seen dramatic drops in engagement. This poses a big problem for projects who are pushing product and suddenly find out there's no one to use it.

However, TRON seems to have bucked this trend and since January has seen huge spikes in engagement with their sub-reddit. The emergence of TRON Tab might also explain this engagement because there is hundreds of users every hour seeing posts on Reddit, clicking into it, and engaging on the sub-reddit.

Incidentally the increased clicks onto the sub-reddit not only drives engagement but further fuel the halo effect by drive clicks towards the news stories. That means not only are people clicking news stories from TRON Tab but they are going to Reddit posts from TRON Tab and clicking into even more news stories. It's a ruthless cycle.

This double channel forces editorial teams to write even more articles causing the whole thing to repeat and grow bigger with every cycle.

Can it continue?

The whole halo effect depends on the TRON community installing TRON Tab and participating quickly with updates as they hit the wires. It will be interesting to see if TRON can be the blueprint other communities use when they get a Tab. Time will tell.