🏡 Building a Home for Independent Content Creators, Optimizing Performance Around the Globe 🌍 & Other Updates

Scrolller Weekly Update December 24th, 2021

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are Scrolller transformation towards a content creators platform, a plan to improve performance for our Russian region users, and enhancing the user experience on the categories page.

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User Highlight

User Feedback

This week's user highlight goes to "JOE". The summary of user feedback is as follows:

It would be really great to have the ability to hide specific posts. As I am curating favorites from a few specific subreddits, I want to be able to hide posts I have already seen (or even favorited), so I am only seeing new posts that I haven't reviewed yet.

Scrolller's Action

"JOE"

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We would like to let you know that we have added this to our issue ticket list. The team will prioritize the task in the upcoming estimation meeting.

If you would like to share any feature feedback and contributions, don't hesitate to let us know. We greatly appreciate you taking valuable time to offer us feedback and support us on this journey towards building Scrolller.

Go Here to help us with Scrolller Features testing.

User Experience

329457 → 334424

Planned Performance Improvements

Scrolller’s topmost priority is to provide our users with the best content load Speed. Previously, Scrolller didn’t have enough resources to enhance its infrastructure. With the support from our premium users, we are now able to prioritize these infrastructure enhancements.

• Why Scrolller is slow in the Russian region?

  20% of our users are from the Russian region. Yet, they are having the slowest content load speeds. This is because our current infrastructure is hosted in Canada. There is no direct undersea cable that links the Russian region to Canada. Since the data has to pass through several networking cables, firewalls, and routers, the content load speed is affected. With the same infrastructure, US region users are enjoying content load speeds of less than 1 second. Whereas in the Russian region same content is taking more than 5 seconds to load.

  Attached is an undersea cable map showing Canada and Russia has no linked direct network link.

  

• How the team is working to resolve this issue?

  The team has decided to set up a cache server in the Russian region that will serve the content to our users from the fastest route available. When we investigated we found that Russia has a direct link with only 3 countries that are Finland, Poland, and Japan.

  To resolve this issue we have three locations to set up a cache server.

  • Set up a server in Moscow - Russia

  • Setup a server in Varsovie - Poland

  • Set up a server in Frankfurt - Germany

  The team decided to set up a cache server in Poland instead of Moscow because connections from Russia to other countries are very limited. We choose Poland as it connects to multiple regions including Russia plus we can set up the servers in Poland with our current hosting provider. It will get rid of the additional complexity of moving to another hosting platform.

  It will allow us to serve the content faster to the Russian region, Poland, Denmark, Germany, Finland, and all linked countries.

  We still reached out to our hosting provider to make sure we choose the best location for our server that will resolve the problem on hand.

  This new cache server will help in increasing the content load speed for our 24.4% of users. It will also off-load this traffic from the current infrastructure that will increase the performance of Scrolller in other countries as well.

• Costs for Scrolller to support this change

  Setting up this new infrastructure will require setting up an API server and a Cache server with SSD Nvme storage. Both servers will cost Scrolller $406 a month. Since we have new premium subscriptions to support this cost. The team is now prioritizing this to provide a homogeneous fast content loading experience around the globe.

• Future expansions in performance areas

  Scrolller started to collect the user experience metrics from last week. This data includes the content load speed at the user end. This data will provide us with exact areas where we need to work on performance. Next week we will share all the analytics we gathered in this regard.

  Once we set up this new server and make sure our experiment is successful. As the additional revenue comes in, we intend to set up distributed cache servers around the globe based on the user experience report. This will ensure that every user is being served with the content from the nearest and fastest route available. Adding these new servers will make Scrolller much more resilient to downtimes.

Sort and Filters on Categories Page

The categories page allows users to explore their interests. From the start, the categories page has been lacking alot of essential filters and sortings making it harder for users to explore their interests. At the request of our users, the team has started to work on making the categories page feature-rich. Previously we only have an option to search a specific category. With this update, we are now introducing more ways to explore your interests.

• New sorting options

  The Categories page was lacking any way of sorting. It was hard for our users to explore ~192 main categories. including over 1700 subcategories. With this new update, users will be able to sort the categories on following parameters

  • Sort via Alphabetical order (Ascending, Descending)

  • Sort based on popularity (High → Low, Low → High)

• Filters for SFW and NSFW categories

  Scrolller is working on adding the SFW and NSFW filters, making it easier for our users to explore their interests. These filters will only display categories accordingly. The team is also looking into expanding SFW categories so our users can enjoy SFW Scrolller equally as they enjoy the NSFW side of Scrolller.

  

Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts

• Content Recommendation (Testing)

• Sort and Filters on Categories (In Progress)

• Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)

• Scrolller APP (Back Log)

• Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)

Revenue

Turmoil at OnlyFans and Indie Adult Content Platforms

Indie adult content platforms all around the web are starting to demonetize their adult content. . This is destroying the financial stability of 1,000,000’s creators.

Only fans have 2 million creators that have collectively made $3 billion in earnings since its launch. That includes reality stars, former pro athletes, celebrity musicians, and social media influencers, all of whom post varying degrees of adult content. The bulk of creators, however, remain bona fide indie adults - many of whom rely on earnings from the platform to survive. And now that the popular platform just wants to throw it all away by a good SFW content platform, it just feels like they used all of their content creators just for sake of fame.

Scrolller as Content Creators Platform

Scrolller empathizes with all of the content creators and understands the frustration among them. As a content platform, it is one of the priorities for us to make sure we provide a safe place for all of those abandoned content creators that were shunned to disastrous effects.

• How Scrolller is planning on becoming the home for content creators

  Scrolller has started to work on an MVP for the content creators where they can post both SFW and NSFW content. The first thing is we want to earn people’s trust by making sure we don’t do any false promises. Scrolller will provide a safe environment for our content creators, as being a User-Driven Company, we listen to what our users have to say about the product.

• What approach we will take to make sure that we don’t get banned

  Scrolller will take extra measures to ensure that no content that is underage, abusive, violent, or involved in criminal activities is posted on the platform. This means we would be running extra-human checks on all of our content creators ensuring that they are who they claim to be. This will cost us more money but the safety of our users and creators is our first and foremost responsibility.

• The success of Scrolller and Content creators

  Scrolller is a content platform. The availability of original content will help in driving more users to our website. Whereas content creators will have a platform with 7 million monthly users and growing. Scrolller will promote their content to help them to get more subscriptions. It will prove to be a win-win situation for both Scrolller and Content creators.

• Development needs to achieve this goal

  Scrolller has started to plan out new features that will expand our platform to original content creators. With these features, we are focusing on making sure that it is easy to get started on Scrolller. Some of the areas that need to be developed are as follows:

  • Features for Content Creation

  • Infrastructure updates

  • Monetization for content creators

  We will start sharing the UI/UX for the new features as we polish them. Your feedback will help us to make Scrolller a platform that you love.

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

1.2% → 1.8% of our overall traffic

Outreach Team Update

This week, big results have come from our outreach team efforts on Reddit. A big part of our organic social traffic has always come from Reddit, as some of our fans are users of this social media platform, too. So the team decided to invest some time trying to engage with Redditors and invite them to try Scrolller.

Social Traffic Update:

The outreach team started to post on a new NSFW Twitter niche this week that lead to promising results last week. With tests done, the team decided to start doing daily posting & engagement on this new channel. So far, the current Twitter accounts & this one lead to a notable spike in sessions.

• ALL Social Sessions  27,195 → 39,142 (43.9% increase)

• TW Sessions 3,952 → 5,979 (51.2% increase)

Outreach URLs Sessions 27,745

Reddit

The team has managed to get big amounts of traffic coming from Reddit and is still thinking of a way to keep this traffic going. So far, they have encountered +80 cool Redditors who loved our website and decided to create an account!

What presence would you like to see from Scrolller on Reddit? Please tell us in the comments!

Follow us to not miss anything: 🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter

Thank you for being our fans and followers on social media.

Do let us know anywhere if you have strategies that have worked for you on social media/outreach or have any valuable feedback so we can learn from them. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

• CTA Test (In Progress)

• Implementing Reddit (In Progress)

• User Generated Collections: Create and share your favorites and follows (In Progress)

• Hashtag experiment (Done)

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Nick — Working on refining the email system for content recommendations.

Karol — Enhancements on the Categories page.

Valentin — Scored a perfect homerun on increasing traffic to Scrolller from Social Media.

Tim — Content recomendations are finally ready to be delivered to our users. Running final quality checks to ensure everything is up to the mark.

Matt — Had a surgery and resting. We wish you a fast recovery Matt.

Marite — Doing and excellent job in improving Scrolllers user experience.

Gabriel — Joined as Frontend Engineer and really passionate to work with Scrolller.

Hamza — Enjoying some days off with family and friends.

Mannan — Working on the premium features and content creators platform.

Chris — Working on bringing investments for Scrolller development.

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

• Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)

• Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)

• Scrapper Updates (Design Stage)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Backlog)

• CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)

P.S. As a reminder, subscribe to our newsletter if you are yet to walk with us on this Building Scrolller exciting yet challenging journey.

Also: Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q us translate Scrolller to Russian.

To help us with Scrolller features testing, Go Here

Until next time, happy Scrollling!