🛠 Categories Page Updates, New Designs for Content Creators & Performance Upgrades on Scrolller

Scrolller Weekly Update January 23rd, 2022

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is new categories page updates, upgrades to resolve performance issues, planned features for creators economy, and more.

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Newsletter Frequency Update

It is to inform you all that from next week, we are updating the frequency of publishing the newsletter from every week to every second week. This will give us enough time to prepare for the newsletter and to ensure its quality of content. Thank you for looking forward to our newsletter.

User Highlight

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

Hi, I am not sure YET about supplying my credit or debit card number to pay for premium. I am hoping I can use a VISA Debit card instead, is that possible? God I hope so. Thank you.

Scrolller's Action

Alxx we understand your concern and we assure you that Scrolller takes the privacy of its user and protection of their personal data as its number one priority and responsibility.

For your concern regarding payment information, we use Stripe as our payment processing service and none of your information such as CC/DC number or your bank information is saved in our servers.

We are also making sure that this information should be reflected on our site so that every user feels safe with scrolller and knows that we don't save any of their payment information.

We are also looking into integrating multiple payment methods on our site other than CC and DC. We are sharing some early mockups of what this new experience would look like at our user’s end.

User Experience

351285 →359102

Categories Page Updates

The categories page on Scrolller is one of the most visited and liked pages on our website. It allows the users to refine their user experience and allows them to explore their interests. At the request of our users, the team started to work on making the categories page feature-rich. Previously we only had 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 are now able to sort the categories on the following parameters

  • Sort via Alphabetical order (Ascending, Descending)

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

  

  Upcoming 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.

  

• New Header Design

  The team has refreshed the look and feel of the whole page by introducing a new header design that is consistent with the whole Scrolller website. This change fixed the cluttered feeling that our users previously had on the categories page. Our target is to make the page simpler yet featureful where every feature has high visibility and is self-explanatory.

• Fix for Hamburger Menu

  One of the issues that were reported to us by our users was that on the mobile experience the icon to open the hamburger menu overlapped with that of the search field. We have now fixed and deployed this change for all of our users.

Changes for Performance Upgrade on Scrolller

Scrolller is working hard on providing its users with the best user experience and performance. This week we onboarded an experienced DevOps engineer that will help us in making Scrolller lightning fast. With his help and experience, we are finding out some areas that were a cause of the performance drop.

• What are the issues that are responsible for the performance drop on the Scrolller?

  With help of our new member Sergiu, we identified that our caching host is using its full network bandwidth capacity. When we analyzed it we found that it was consistently at 100% usage with no room to breathe at all.

  Loading multiple full videos on gallery view make the performance drop, as page load longer and use more of our network bandwidth. In countries where internet speed is a problem, loading all the videos as users scroll makes the website even slower on the user’s end as multiple videos start to buffer in the backend.

  We found out that our current way of storing content causes problems when having millions of files. The storage infrastructure needs to improve to accommodate large data sets.

  Our ads traffic takes 3/4 of the bandwidth on host4, and we use the whole bandwidth of this server.

• Proposed fixes for these issues and how we believe it will improve the performance.

  Splitting traffic between caching host and content host to widen our bandwidth with resources already available for us. We expect a sudden performance boost with this as the videos will start to load faster.

  Another way is to display 4 seconds video previews in gallery view like YouTube does, for the page to load faster. This will drastically reduce the page data footprint, thus reducing the page load times. It is also expected that this change will enhance the user experience of our users that are in countries with slow internet connections.

• What fixes have we done so far?

  We have offloaded traffic from Host4 (proxy traffic). Parts of the content load directly from Host2. The download speed from Electron has increased from 12-20KBps to 200-300 KBps. This improved the look and feel of the website, the load speed of some files (those that are going through our cache server), and of the ads. The traffic went under 1 Gbps, but soon it went again up (probably overall traffic increased due to the time of day).

  

  We enabled browser caching of the ads files (mp4, jpg, jpeg, gif, png). This will ensure fast loading of the ads and will save the hosts from a large number of requests.

  We are able to get previews of videos from our content hosts. These short previews are light on the data footprint. Serving these short previews on the home page will tremendously reduce the load on the server plus, it will also allow the website to load faster on the user’s end.

  • There is an issue with getting video previews through caching host that our team is working on resolving at the moment.

User Experience

• 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

Content Creators Updates

The Scrolller team is working on refining the creator’s side of Scrolller. This week we are sharing some new designs of features that we have created for Scrolllers’ creator’s side. We would love to get our user’s feedback on these upcoming features.

• Dedicated Profile Page for Creators

  Users love to know more about the content creators they love and follow. It is very essential to allow the content creators to have their own profile page, through which they can easily interact with their followers. We have designed the creator’s profile page in such a way that allows them to showcase their work elegantly and also display their bio to the users. The below design represents some of the features that will be included in the final product.

  

  Setup Your Own Price

  Content creation is the bread and butter of the majority of indie content creators. They solely rely on the earnings from their content in order to survive. Getting compensated for the hard work that they are doing is very important for the Scrolller. With the setup of the new profile, these content creators will be able to set up their own pricing scheme for their subscribers. Content creators will be able to set up Monthly, Yearly, and Lifetime subscription prices on their own.

  

  Easily Add Content & Create Collections

  Content creators will be able to upload their content easily with just a single click. They can choose the content privacy on whether they want to showcase this content to their free tier followers or their premium subscribers. This gives granular privacy control over each piece of content uploaded. We will also allow our creators to create multiple content collections, each with its own unique URL. The privacy controls can also be applied on the collection level.

  

  User Subscriptions

  Users can easily subscribe to their favorite content creators by visiting their profiles. The content that is marked as private for premium subscribers will appear blurred to the free tier users. On clicking such a piece of content, users will be prompted with a subscription page that will display all the offers that creators have made for their profile. This flexible model will allow the users to have control over what they want to subscribe and they can cancel their subscription at any time they want.

  

• Creators Dashboard

  This new dashboard will allow the creators to see their progress, earnings and to predict their income. Creators can add the payment method by which they want to get paid. They can draw their earnings at any time they want via their selected method. We will also introduce a scheduling system that will automatically transfer the earnings to creators’ default payment method. This will ensure that our creators get paid on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Analytics will give our users insights into how their page is performing. It will give them essential insights into their subscribers and their engagement with content. Our content creators will also be able to accept crypto payments other than usual payment methods.

  

We would love to have your feedback on the new designs that we have created. Your valuable suggestions will help us in polishing these features before we start to work on them.

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

1.7% → 2.0% of our overall traffic

Outreach Team Update

With the help of the new hire, the team is now reinforcing their areas of work, especially with the outreach to other accounts that they are trying to push forward in order for other people to share Scrolller links.

The team is looking forward to automating one of the tasks on their workflow that will save us time, money, and effort to invest in other areas that they can improve in order to reach the objective of 1 million link clicks per month from the outreach team efforts.

Social Traffic Update:

Our traffic this week is pretty similar to last week, but even if the numbers look like nothing has changed, one of our NSFW channels is experiencing a big dump in traffic that the team is trying to resolve, while investing double of time to generate traffic from Reddit.

The team is focusing on jumping to the next level; something big needs to happen in order to reach our objective.

NSFW Channels

The outreach team is experiencing a big dump of a 50% decrease on one of the NSFW channels that we use to generate traffic to our website. This dump is prolonged as these are the results from several weeks ago till now.

As a result of this, the team is already changing everything related to this NSFW channel and the types of content we post about, in hopes of changing this reality and making this channel top-performing in terms of traffic as other channels we manage. So far, they are having a hard time finding a useful formula for this one.

These channels are one of the main sources of traffic the team currently spends time on, in hopes of making it a complex system that delivers hundreds of thousands of link clicks for us each month.

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

• Implementing Reddit (In Progress)

• Working with influencers to encourage Scrolller link sharing (In Progress)

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Karol — Managing the development team and unblocking them on any issues they might have.

Valentin — Building our outreach team, training Tomas, and improving our process.

Tim — Refining recommendations based on users interaction with the emails.

Marite — Updating our designs to improve UI/UX. Creating new journey for content creators.

Gabriel — Improving our header bar components and implementing the new notification system

Sergiu — Identifying issues with Scrolller performance. Improving our hosting system.

Mannan — Joined back team after his vacation. Catching up on things and taking back the lead.

Chris — Transfering responsibilities back to Mannan. Pushing whole product in right direction.

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)

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Until next time, happy scrollling!