I will leave my original comment here with the response from the PolkaWorld team about the points I raised:

A lot to breakdown and discuss with this proposal, first and foremost to get it out of the way: Polkadot needs exposure in the Chinese market, as with any other market, so this type of marketing (articles, interviews, educational videos) simply have to be funded by the treasury. Looking at the metrics from last year, engagement seems not high as many would have liked but this can't just be seen as a failure of the team as there are many factors that drive engagement. However, my concerns are more on the opaqueness of the budget, looking at the proposal document it seems like all of the budget is allocated to paying the salaries of 6 people producing 24 articles (2 articled per month is a two person job?), 1 interview per month + 2 livestreams + Chinese translation, 4 online broadcasts (per month I guess), 4 educational videos (total????), and 1 designer. In my opinion this is a gross overestimation of the amount of work that needs to be covered to produce the content in the proposal, either the hidden costs are included in the salaries (they do mention paying for travel etc. themselves) which means they have done a poor job of representing their costs or they're way overpaying for the content that's getting generated. If Polkaworld's work in the China market was a huge success some of these irregularities could have been ignored but I think further clarification on the budget is necessary at this stage.

PolkaWorld's response:

First of all, thank you for your attention to the proposal! I’d like to clarify a few things, as there seem to be some misunderstandings: - PolkaWorld publishes 24 articles per month, which is roughly 6 articles per week — one article each weekday and a weekly recap on Saturdays. This workload involves two dedicated content creators. - We run 6 livestreams each month: 2 in English and 4 in Chinese. - In addition, we produce one video interview per month, which is sometimes done remotely, but often requires us to attend events in person. These involve travel expenses, but due to their unpredictable nature, we haven’t included them in the budget. - As for educational videos, we produce 4 per month — one per week. Each includes scriptwriting, voiceover, animation, and post-production to deliver a complete and polished video. I hope this helps clarify things for the community member who raised the concern!

One suggestion I would make in light of this would be to have a figure, this could be a GANTT chart or simply a timeline to summarize the cadence of the content that will be produced to dispel anyone misunderstanding (like I did, not saying it was a failure on your part). I would also suggest for the travel budget to definitely have it separate to the salaries and any operational costs and average any travel you might have done in the past and add some overhead to it, any travel budget not spent then can be discussed transparently in your next proposal or could even be rolled into the next budget, decreasing the overall cost to the treasury. I believe that detailed budgeting will help you in the long run, both for your next proposal as well as the community sentiment in terms of accountability. I genuinely appreciate your response and the discussion here, I'll take all of it into consideration. Good luck with your proposal and keep up the good work!

A point I raised with another proposer from the region with some overlap with PolkaWorld team, in terms of their objective of building a community in the region and raising awareness about Polkadot, is that the objective shouldn't be to produce X amount of articles with Y word count, the metrics I would hope for is community growth and engagement.

I think that maybe a new perspective is required to get the effect we're looking for. With that being said, I was satisfied with the response from the PolkaWorld team to my initial scepticism and support their proposal with the criticism laid out above but still disagree with Polkadot's overall strategy in the region and believe that we need a paradigm shift in our approach.