Quote from: gjhiggins on April 10, 2015, 10:49:46 AM

Anyway, you already have some answers w.r.t. generation costs via examining the charges and service tradeoffs implicit in the offerings of the various altcoin creation services. As for marketing costs, that rather assumes that marketing is typically part of the mix and even a basic familiarity with the domain will reveal just how shaky the basis for that assumption.

Thanks for the feedback, Graham! We will iterate and improve the survey.

And yes, the result of the survey will be a part of a scientific publication, in which features that identify specific individuals or altcoins will be removed. In the past few years, we have published papers such as http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/botcoin-ndss14.pdf and http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/IMC13.pdf.

Many of the popular altcoins that we have observed are hosted on websites that clearly reflect a high level of professionalism. We thus make the assumption that a nontrivial amount of effort was spent on marketing, with the goal of attracting more followers and standing out from the other coins.