🔉 New Filter To Enjoy Videos With Sound, 📧 Recommendation Emails Launch for All Users, 📈 Performance Upgrades & more
Scrolller Bi-Weekly Update March 7th, 2022
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our bi-weekly update. This sprint's main highlight is the launch of videos with sound filter, Recommendation emails for all users on Scrolller, upcoming user experience enhancements, object-based storage for scalability, and upcoming scrapper updates to add new content on Scrolller.
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User Highlight
This week's user highlight goes to "Edward Fathom". The summary of user feedback is as follows:
Hello I just bought a one year subscription and I was curious, is your site safe to use, with regular content moderation?
Scrolller's Action
Edward Fathom Thank you for such a great question. Yes, it is safe to use our website. We consistently moderate content on our website and remove content that is illegal, underage, non-consensual, or hateful. If you have any doubts about any content just report it to us, our team will review it and will take appropriate action.
Scrolller is Hiring
UI/UX designer
Scrolller is a content platform that has 7 million active users per month. We are looking for a Resource that can help us design new features and revamp the existing look and feel of our website. This is a long-term opportunity with the potential to grow in the product designer role.
The day-to-day tasks include communication with the team via Slack.
Provide designs and ideas on how can we improve a certain feature on Scrolller.
Produce low fidelity and High fidelity mockups for the development team.
Work with product owners and developers to turn requirements into visual designs that can be translated by developers into features.
If you think you are a good fit for this job post please send us your resume on this form.
Backend engineer (TypeScript, JAVA/Kotlin)
Scrolller is looking to expand its team with an experienced typescript backend developer with some experience in Java/Kotlin. We always enjoy working with people who are interested in expanding their knowledge and can bring new ideas.
The day-to-day activities include communication with the team via Slack.
Keep the team updated with your progress via daily updates.
Communicate any blockers with the team on time to make sure that tasks assigned to you get delivered in time.
If you think you are a good fit for this job post please send us your resume on this form.
User Experience
380658 → 392850
New Features Launched
Videos With Sound Filter Launch
Video Content is much more enjoyable when it has sound. Scrolller has approximately 9 million videos. But we had no information on which of these videos have sound and which ones are muted. This information is crucial for the sound filter to work. Our development team created a user-side script that identifies if a video has sound or not and updates it in our DB. Last week we tested 5,603,457 videos and found that 3,142,011 have sound. We are consistently checking for more content with sound and adding them in the “Content with Sound” filter for our users.
This new filter is launched for our users. They can filter content on the home page and in collections to see just videos with sound. Some users might not be aware that we have videos with sound other than ads.
How to access this filter?
On the home page when the user can access it in filters in the navbar, one can see “
videos with sound”
the toggle button. Just activate it and close filters, and the user will be able to see content with sound.
On collections, under the filters button in the dropdown menu, our users can see a newly added option “
videos with sound”
, click on it, and if this collection has videos with the sound, it will get displayed.
Filters allow users to refine content according to their personal preferences, please let us know in the comments which filters you want us to add next.
Recommendation Emails Preferences
Scrolller launched recommendation emails for its beta users last week. Currently, the process of opting in for these emails was only via invitation. Now that Scrolller is launching these recommendation emails for all of its users on Scrolller, our team developed a new page to easily join the recommendation program. We want to provide our users with full control over the emails that they will receive.
How to access these settings
These settings can easily be accessed by navigating to the accounts page on the sidebar and selecting the “Email Preferences” tab. The users can opt-in to receive these emails by toggling on “Recommended Content”. Users have full control over when they want to start receiving these emails and when to stop them. On turning the toggle ON users will be able to select the type of content recommendations that they want to receive. They can choose to receive NSFW and SFW content recommendations or Both at the same time. Users have full control over the frequency of emails that they want to receive.
Users will have the Recommended content delivered right into their registered emails in 3 easy steps.
Opt-in to receive recommendation emails
Choose your content preferences
Setup how often you want to receive these emails
Enjoy your recommendations via email
Upcoming Features
Navbar Extension to Whole Scrolller
Scrolller Navbar addition on homepage recieved an amazing response from our users. We know that every user has a different personality and a very distinct taste in content that they like. Providing the facility to our users to further refine the content in the middle of their scrolling has increased the engagement and interest of users.
The team has decided to extend the navbar experience to the whole Scrolller. Our team is working on introducing the bottom navbar on the collections page as well. This will allow users to Follow a collection or Sort/Filter the content within the collection without scrolling all the way up to the top.
Our target is to enhance this navbar to the whole website including the leaderboard and categories page. This will ensure a human-centered design for Scrolller that will improve user experience.
User Experience
Content Recommendation Emails (Launched for Beta User)
Filters for Excluding Content (In Progress)
Filters on Categories (Back Log)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Revenue
Performance Improvements
The development team is working on Object Storage for faster delivery of content. It will also improve the scalability of our host servers. Scrolller currently has 4 host servers that are dedicated to content storage. This week the content from our Pico server has been moved to a new object storage cluster. All the traffic that was previously handled by pico is now transferred to the object storage cluster.
The performance can't be higher with a single server. But in the future, thanks to the fact that the traffic will be evenly distributed, the performance will increase as well. The object storage allows us to now add virtually an infinite number of servers to the cluster and it will behave as a single unit. It also eliminated the effort to configure each server individually as now we don’t need to configure different hostnames, different paths, disks, multiple Nginx configurations, etc.
The page load times in America and Europe continue to become more stable as we can see from the graphs below. In America, our mean content load time has dropped down to 0.2 seconds in various regions. Our target is to achieve a homogeneous experience throughout the world for our users.
Page Load Time (seconds) - America
Page Load Time (seconds) - Europe
Scrapper Updates
Scrolller turned off its scrapper due to the increasing complexity of infrastructure. The storage servers were filled up to the max capacity and we were not able to handle any more addition of data. Thanks to our new infrastructure updates, we can now virtually add an infinite storage space to store new content. This brings good news for our supporters and regular users. As soon as these updates are done (Next 2 weeks) we will start our scrappers again. This will allow us to add ~50 Gb of new data every single day. This will also resolve the issue with sorting “NEW” content on collections as it is dependent on the scrapper to retrieve that information from the source website.
We would love to have your feedback on the performance fixes. Your valuable suggestions will help us in improving the website around the globe.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
Scrapper Updates (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
2.5% → 2.3% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team:
One of the team members of the outreach team got involved with several new tasks and responsibilities, this will help to keep the workload divided.
The team trusts this will increase efficiency and will help to reduce monotonous and hard work, taking this as a big improvement to their workflow.
Content Creators Outreach
The team is working towards the goal of having 20 content creators onboarded in our beta platform, overall, they figured out they need to change our approach in order to reach our objective. They are improving the next areas based on their learnings:
Communication in our offer
We will show more visuals about how our content creators platform works and how creators can take advantage of it
Add the option to join using an application form without the need to talk to a Creators’ Representative
This will help to onboard the creators that have a tight schedule or aren’t comfortable with having a video-call
Follow-ups
Reach content creators that haven’t given us an answer to remind them that our offer is still active and we are waiting for an answer for them in hopes of increasing the conversion rate
This has been the main focus of the team these past weeks and their eyes are looking at improving the conversion rate that they have from the content creators they reach.
Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic
Implementing Reddit (In Progress)
Working with influencers to encourage Scrolller link sharing (In Progress)
Content creators outreach (In Progress)
Team Highlights
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Karol — Working on implementing new payment processor on Scrolller.
Valentin — Working on content creators outreach.
Tomas — Working on improving Social media outreach of Scrolller.
Tim — Working on introducing tagging system.
Sergiu — Introduced new object-based storage system to enhance performance.
Mannan — Working on hiring new talent and making sure to consistently deliver new features to our users .
Chris — leading Scrolller team by example, working on improving company culture.
Lukasz — Working on email automation, both on the front end and the back end.
Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.
Road Map
You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments
This week
Sounds only Filter for video content (Done)
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Scrapper Updates (In Progress)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Backlog)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
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Until next time, happy Scrollling!