Disclaimer that I can only comment from the perspective of a visual artist on this.
Anyone who had the experience of competing in the Neopets Beauty Contest can attest to the issues that come with "popularity vote" based contests involving a craft: The emphasis always ends up falling on who spends more time begging for votes rather than on the quality of the content. That's going to be an issue with the current system regardless of how many folks in the fandom are aware of the Ursa Majors.
And those who spend an ungodly number of hours on their work aren't going to want to spend a ton of time advertising for an "award" that is essentially meaningless (no offense).
It speaks volumes just how little impact these awards have on visibility when a piece of content that won first has only received 100ish likes and 1,500ish views on youtube to-date, versus the second place in the same category that has gotten over 500,000 likes and 6 million views (and rightly so).
There is, of course, a time and place for high-school election flavored contests. That said, the quality of entries and the people who care enough to bother voting (not to mention bother to track down the winning content that I notice aren't linked on the winners' page) is bound to reflect that.
At the end of the day it depends on what the actual point of these awards are.
Disclaimer that I can only comment from the perspective of a visual artist on this.
Anyone who had the experience of competing in the Neopets Beauty Contest can attest to the issues that come with "popularity vote" based contests involving a craft: The emphasis always ends up falling on who spends more time begging for votes rather than on the quality of the content. That's going to be an issue with the current system regardless of how many folks in the fandom are aware of the Ursa Majors.
And those who spend an ungodly number of hours on their work aren't going to want to spend a ton of time advertising for an "award" that is essentially meaningless (no offense).
It speaks volumes just how little impact these awards have on visibility when a piece of content that won first has only received 100ish likes and 1,500ish views on youtube to-date, versus the second place in the same category that has gotten over 500,000 likes and 6 million views (and rightly so).
There is, of course, a time and place for high-school election flavored contests. That said, the quality of entries and the people who care enough to bother voting (not to mention bother to track down the winning content that I notice aren't linked on the winners' page) is bound to reflect that.
At the end of the day it depends on what the actual point of these awards are.