Hello, everyone.

First of all, congratulations to all the winners of Zama Content Creators program in Season 1, which are 6.2% of the total (myself included, hehe)!

Zama Creator Program

Zama launches Creator Program with monthly rewards for genuine and impactful creators. Multi-year commitment focuses on sustainable value creation over traditional one-time opaque token distributions.

https://www.zama.ai

Recently, Zama has officially announced the first batch of winners, consisting of 250 people. The top 100 receive tokens, while those ranked 101 to 250 are awarded the OG NFT. Along with this, Zama has also shared a well-crafted dashboard together with comprehensive metrics explaining how winners were selected. I think this is a masterclass in transparency, something I rarely find, even in Web3.

That said, I noticed some debate on X whether larger accounts have too much of an edge on the competition? So, I wanted to explore this question by using the data Zama shared publicly. Personally, I really admire Zama’s products and the challenges they are tackling in Web3 engagement. This is why I am excited to continue contributing to Web3 with Zama in 2025.

First, what factors impact the winners?

Looking at the dashboard again, there are four main features: POSTS, FOLLOWERS, SMART FOLLOWERS, and IMPRESSION. In the Image 1 above, I use a scatter plot to explore potential relationships between these features and ranking. My observations are as follows:

• POSTS: Surprisingly, the number of posts does not seem to play a major role.

• FOLLOWERS, SMART FOLLOWERS: There is a slight trend suggesting that accounts with more (smart) followers tend to rank higher.

• IMPRESSION: This appears to be the most decisive factor, with higher impressions strongly correlating with better rankings.

Now, we have a clearer hint of the key factors behind better rankings: FOLLOWERS and IMPRESSIONS. However, since we don’t want the number of FOLLOWERS to be the main bias, I examined the feature distributions between two groups using bar graphs for additional insights. The results in Image 2 show that:

• FOLLOWERS: The first group is largely composed of bigger accounts, with the vast majority holding 10,000+ followers. In contrast, less than half of the second group reach that threshold (84% vs. 44.7%).

• IMPRESSIONS: Only the first group managed to exceed 100,000 impressions (14%), and most of them sit in the 10,000+ impressions range, while this is true for less than half of the second group (84% vs. 38%).

Overall, the results suggest that the first winner group is significantly better at generating IMPRESSIONS, which seems fair. However, we also observe that very large accounts (with 10K+ followers) tend to dominate the 1–100 rankings easier than other. From both images, we can conclude that FOLLOWERS and IMPRESSIONS are indeed the two key factors separating the groups.

Finally, we want to ensure that FOLLOWERS do not disproportionately drive IMPRESSIONS i.e., quality matters. To test this, I visualized the correlation heatmap in Image 3, which illustrates that IMPRESSIONS and FOLLOWERS are only 29% correlated. In other words, a smaller account can still achieve high impressions if the engagement quality is strong.

However, if we look back at Image 2, we can see that smaller accounts with fewer than 1,000 followers do face a challenge: only 1% made it into the top 100, and just 3.3% reached ranks 101–250. While it isn’t impossible, these accounts need to rely heavily on quality engagement and creative content to compete effectively, as Image 4 shows.

In summary, Zama’s leaderboard design successfully ensures that follower counts do not completely overshadow content quality. That said, accounts with fewer than 1,000 followers may still find it more difficult to secure a spot. The system could be further refined to prevent ranks 1–100 from being dominated by large accounts,

as the current setup may not provide sufficient incentive for smaller creators.

I hope these insights prove useful for anyone preparing for the next Zama season.

Good luck!