🎉 Launch of Download Button, Sorted Out Sorting Issues, & Release Notes

Scrolller Weekly Update December 10th, 2021

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are the Launch of a major release, download button for premium users, sort issues fixed, new ad distribution system, and more.

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User Highlight

Our users share their love for scrolller by sharing their feedback about our service and by being open about their pain points. As a company with User-Driven Development Focus, we welcome this feedback and make sure to prioritize this.

User Feedback

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

I remember when I first came to this site, there was a button to hide things I wasn't interested in. Now I'm being over run by things I don't want to see. Regardless of what I'm looking at, I should have the option of hiding what I don't want. Can't build a proper "Following" tab if I can't explore interests. If I can favorite something I should also be able to hate something.

Scrolller's Action

"Steven"

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

319519 → 323109

Sorting Sorted Out

The Scrolller development team has sorted out the issues with the Sorting. Previously we discussed two possible solutions for this problem. Our team went with splitting the responsibilities of scrapper by dividing it into smaller, manageable microservices. This positive change towards breaking the monolith application into microservices will eliminate the single point of failure. This will also get rid of additional complexity in running the service as microservices can be deployed separately and can be modified without affecting any other areas.

Expected Change in Behavior of Users:

Since the sorting is now fixed we can accurately measure which of the sorting methods our users are using. Previously "Top" was the most used sort method. We believe that it is because of is the only sort method that was working for every collection. We are waiting for the data to come in from this week that will give us clear insights on which sort methods are most used and need further improvement. The below image shows the sort methods used on Scrolller in the last 7 days.

Slow Loading Popup

Scrolller is all about content. If the content is not loading fast enough that means the users are having a poor user experience. To accurately track what percentage of our users are still facing problems with content load speed. Our development team implemented a new popup that appears only if we detect a slow connection. This new popup is backed with necessary analytics that will give us an idea about the regions that are having slow loading issues.

Measuring Content Load at User End:

Our development team has finally launched the tool that will provide us with real insights into the user experience. Since Scrolller is a content website, the key user experience is the content load speed. Our new script will provide us with the necessary insights into the actual content load speed at the user’s end. We have made sure this script doesn't affect our user’s privacy in any way. How does it work?

• Take mean time to load the first 100 content on Scrolller on the user’s device.

• Log that into a database along with the user’s geographical location (country only).

• We will process this information to get meaningful content load speed at the user’s end based on their countries.

How Scrolller will utilize this new information:

We will set up our cache servers in that specific region where users are having a bad experience with loading content on Scrolller, so they can benefit from the top speeds. Our development team is looking into how we can identify a user’s geographical location and redirect them to the cache server that is closest to them. It will ensure an optimal user experience no matter where our users are using the website.

The following image shows that users from, some countries are having the best page load times while others being distant from our servers have a far greater page load time. The data from the last 7 days shows that on average 72% of Scrolller users are having a great user experience. Scrolller is focused on providing the rest of 28% with the same.

Content Recommendations on Collections

Some of the collections on Scrolller have less content than expected. When there is a lack of content, but we still want to fill space on the page then we repeat that content. Scrolller is working on updating the collections with the latest content but this won’t solve the problem if the source doesn't have any more content to collect.

Two possible solutions that we had for this user experience issue were as follows:

• Disable all collections that have fewer data. ~less than 10 content.

• Use our content recommendation system to populate the collection with similar content and suggest to our users a similar collection that might have more data than they are interested in.

The first solution would have been a temporary fix and a lot of collections that our users love would have been disabled due to that. This solution was in itself a bad user experience. Our content recommendation engine is almost ready. We believe that using that content recommendation on the collections where there is less content will allow the users to navigate easily to similar collections. This will not only improve the user experience but also will help with Scrolller discovery.

Download Button for Premium Users

The download button has been launched for our users. This exclusive feature is currently available to our premium users only. You can now enjoy your favorite content offline by downloading it to your device. Currently, users can only download the content that is hosted on Scrolller. For the content that we have hosted from our content partner users might face issues downloading it. Our team is focused on further refining this feature and making sure our users are enjoying it to its fullest. Our development team looked into various designs for this download button but ended up with this one as it looked the cleanest. They took extra steps and updated the icons on Scrolller to show their true intent.

Next Steps: Our team is working on adding a loading animation as large content might take some time before users can see it starting to download on their end. This gives the user an impression that the feature might not be working. An animation will ensure that users get an idea that the feature is working as intended and download is taking some time to start.

Please let us know what are your thoughts on these metrics. If you can think of a user experience metric that might help us understand what areas need more focus and improvement, please let us know in the comments.

Release Notes:

Scolller has launched a successful new release. This release was focused on resolving user experience issues, adding new features for our users, and ensuring the safety of the system we also added email verification on the user signup.

• Beta signup for recommendations

• Slow loading popup

• Sort by - No scrapper

• Download Content Feature for Premium Users

• Email Verification for New Signups

• User Experience Metrics Gathering

• Ad Control System

• Collection Sort Analytics

• Bug fixes

  • Followed User Collection Bug Fix

  • Download Issues Fix

  • LeaderBoard- Make whole row clickable Fix

  • Center Align Collection Title on Podium Page.

  • Ignore case on categories search

Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts

• Recording User Experience Metrics (Done)

• Unlocking Categories plan (Improvements)

• Content Recommendation (In Progress)

• Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)

• Scrolller APP (Back Log)

• Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)

Revenue

Ad Control System

Scrolller has various advertisement partners. Some generate more revenue than others. We wanted to transfer more traffic toward the partners which provide us with great CPM. The only problem was Scrolller was designed to serve all advertisements at an equal rate. Our development team started working on a new Ad control system that would allow us to control the frequency of Ads that show up from a partner, thus controlling traffic towards that partner.

This new system is ready and launched with our new release. This will allow Scrolller to strategically control the flow of traffic to generate more revenue from our Ad partners.

Next Steps Towards a Sophisticated Ad Control System:

Our current version of the ad control system is very basic. Our development team has been assigned the task to work on the creation of a sophisticated ad control system. This system will allow us more granular control over ads. Some features that would be a part of this system are as follows:

• Control over displaying Ads on various areas of Scrolller

• Automatically prioritize high performing Ads

• Automatically disable low performing Ads

• Auto Prioritisation of Ad partners

• Distribution of Ads based on users geographical location

• Distribution of Ads based on user interests

• Bidding system for the dedicated featured Ad slots on Scrolller

This system will lay the foundation of a sophisticated targeted Ad control system for Scrolller. In the future, we might want to remove 3rd party advertisement partners completely and start working with the direct ad placements from our clients.

Development of Direct Advertisers Onboarding System

In a step to make the Scrolller self-sufficient in terms of revenue from advertisements, we have started to work on a new landing page for advertisers that are interested in working with us recently. Scrolller has over 200 Million page views per month. We serve over 45 Million Ad impressions to our current affiliates. Our Ui/Ux created a beautiful mockup for the landing page that will allow us to attract the market and get clients to signup with us directly.

Our development team has started to work on an onboarding system where a client will be onboarded in a guided manner. This new system will not only guide our clients about the potential deal they are getting but also upload their Ad creatives for review. Below is a flow diagram of how this system will work.

• Onboard Direct Advertiser.

• Review their Company information and Ad media.

• Invoicing for the deal they have signed up for.

• A reminder email about the next invoice.

Let us know in the comments what you think about this plan. What improvements do you suggest in this regard?

Roadmap for Growth in Revenue

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)

• Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)

• Scrapper Updates (In Progress)

• CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)

• Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)

Social Traffic

0.7% → 0.8% of our overall traffic

Outreach Team Update

This week, our single-person-army outreach team keeps dedicating time to our NSFW channels & on Reddit which caused a notorious spike in the traffic coming from Reddit this week just from the outreach team URLs.

Social Traffic Update:

Our overall traffic from social media is back on the track from holidays now, and the outreach team decided to start tracking all their URLs, so we can have all that traffic in the same place and start knowing our audience better to improve our current reach.

Total Social Sessions 16,165 → 17,585 (8.7% increase)

FB & TW Sessions 4,133 → 4,522 (9.4% increase)

Outreach URLs Sessions 6,800

NSFW Content Automation

Our outreach team is now considering the automation of the NSFW accounts we use to get traffic to our website, this can make a floor for us and save the team time to invest in other outreach tools & methods that can give us even more results than we currently have.

What do you think? Have you automated posting before? Please tell us in the comments.

Reddit Tests Done

The team started posting the "Scrolller version" of more than 50 subreddits which led to promising results, giving us hope that this is one of the most powerful outreach tools the team has right now, along with the NSFW content. So the team definitively needs to strengthen their muscles on it.

These are some encouraging insights coming from Reddit.

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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 or have any valuable feedback so we can learn from them. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

• Hashtag experiment (Done)

• Implementing Reddit (In Progress)

• CTA Test (In Progress)

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

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Nick — Downloading new content from Scrolller and forwading it to friends.

Karol — Leading the development team from the front.

Valentin — Successful social media experimentation increased the traffic on Scrolller.

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 — Suggestions on the content removal and updation.

Mannan — Completed an amazing release, Preparing for the next one with even better features.

Chris — Working on creating the best remote hiring platform and finding the best talent for Scrolller.

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

• Content Recommendation System (Testing)

• Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (In Progress)

• Scrapper Updates (Design Stage)

• CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)

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Until next time, happy scrolling!