🏗 Recommendation Beta Update and Early Look Into Content Creator User Flows 👀

Scrolller Weekly Update January 6th, 2022

Jan 06, 2022

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is recommendation updates, incognito mode detection, new premium features, early look into content creator user flow, and much more

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User Highlight

User Feedback

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

It would be really helpful to have a login button on the side rollover/out panel so I don’t have to be at the home page to click it ...

Scrolller's Action

Thank you Cody for sharing your feedback with the team. Luckily this time we are happy to say that a fix is already in the works. We have been working on a new control bar that will follow the user and allow them greater control of the content experience as well as give you access to important functions like logging on.

Let us know what you think of the new navigation layout and filtering system by leaving a comment below.

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User Experience

334424 → 345828

Incognito mode detection

Using incognito mode can skew the numbers in analytics, it’s good to know the estimated percentage of visitors that prefer to stay incognito. The frontend team developed a way to solve this issue and get us better data regarding our users.

First, the browser is identified through navigator validations. Then with it, storage, memory usage, service workers, or cache are evaluated. Since these attributes behave in different ways on normal and incognito mode is possible to track which mode is used.

With the data gained analytics reports can be more accurate 💪. Right now we haven’t collected enough data to fully understand how this affects our true user count. If you are familiar with this challenge and think you can help guide us please leave a comment

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Recommendation Update

A big variety of content is a strength of Scrolller but it takes some effort for the right content to reach the right users. The content recommendation system is built to solve this issue using machine learning. The follows and favorites of over 360000 registered users are collected. Those are then aggregated to see which user likes which of the over 200000 collections.

A special algorithm is used to find correlations in the preferences for different collections. Collections that are liked by the same people are classified as similar. If you have not yet interacted with a collection that is similar to the ones you like the algorithm suggests it to you. The more it knows about each user the better and more personalized the recommendation will become.

We invested quite some time over the last few months to get the system reliably running. And now we can start using its many applications. First will be personalized emails to give you nice packages of the most interesting content. And soon we will bring it to the site and help you find the stuff you like directly in Scrolller’s feed. Until then getting these emails out is our priority.

The Email client for the recommendation emails consumes the recommendation API by passing it user information shared through the beta onboarding form. It fetches the user ID, looks through the recommendation database that is refreshed daily based on new data, and pulls 12 collections tied to the user based on their NSFW or SFW preferences.

Collections ids are then passed to another API on the scrolller database to fetch thumbnails and titles in order to generate a dynamic email unique to each user. The email client also sets the frequency for when the email should be sent using SendGrid.

Collections in the mail are given unique links and a disable button that persists the engagements into the database that further refine the recommendations and set the preferences of what collections would be shown while also giving valuable information on their relevance.

Users can disable collections, opt for NSFW if signed up for SFW, and opt-out entirely from the emails right from the email itself.

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

Revenue has been increasing and looks to continue to increase as continue improving premium and work towards maximizing our advertising revenue. This is a welcome update and helps the team continue improving Scrolller.

New implementation of source button

Another new premium feature that is on its way is the updated source button. I’ve been personally using Scrolller for years and one of the actions I took regularly when I found content that really resonated with me was to look for the long/original version of the short video. The team has started to work on bringing that function directly into Scrolller.

We are starting by scanning the internet for the long/original versions of all of our content. Once we have a list of original sources we will update the source button to include all options available to users. These options will include the original source link, Reddit link, RedGifs link, and a field to allow you to share a link if the original doesn’t exist.

The original link will be premium locked, but if you help us find the sources for the content we will gift your account with a free premium subscription, once verified. We are hopeful that with the communities help we can make asking for the source a thing of the past.

Update on Content Creators

For the launch of our upload system, we are going to limit it to independent established creators. Most platforms would open it up to everyone, but this can quickly spiral and degrade content quality. Established creators are those with at least 50 fans that have purchased subscriptions or paid for content from a creator. An established creator also is consistent with posting.

We can focus on finding creators for our highest traffic niches on scrolller and work down the list of collections finding 5 or more creators for every category. Once we found a baseline of great creators and learn how to do content moderation at the scale needed, we can open up content uploading to most users

Above are the designs for the new content creator user flow. We want to make it easy for them to create multiple collections and share new content with the Scrolller community. Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on this new system.

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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

1.8% → 1.5% of our overall traffic

Outreach Team Update

This week, the outreach team is looking forward to hiring a Social Media Manager, leading interviews, and candidate sourcing. This well-spent amount of time translated into less time invested on the Reddit front, which is the principal source of the team’s traffic right now. Overall, they managed to keep that traffic flow going with a little dump even if Twitter is having a notable spike.

Social Traffic Update:

We’re back from the holidays! And our Twitter accounts surely are experiencing that comeback, with almost another 50% increase in our overall traffic coming from this channel. The growth here is nonstop and the future seems promising!

ALL Social Sessions 39,142 → 33,285 (14.9% decrease)
TW Sessions 5,979 → 8,579 (43.4% increase)

Outreach URLs Sessions 27,745 → 24,782 (10.6% decrease)

Effective methods to growing social media channel

The most important thing that we did for our accounts to grow on social media was to add enough value so people have a reason to actually follow or engage with the content. This, with the help of actively delivering the content that our users love, brought thousands of followers and millions of impressions to our social channels.

Being active is an important part of the job. Dedicating some time each week to engage with similar content and give the account a little bit of life can lead to great results on yours. Go spread some love! You can implement these ideas as well. Remember, why would someone follow you?

How we plan to grow social media without putting in more effort

The amount of time that a team can dedicate to outreach is limited. At some point, you have to work hard so other people do the job for you and let the outreach cycle run for itself. Right now, we need online communities and users that are fans of our content to go out there and share our content and links with others. We are in touch with several NSFW communities & accounts and we think we could start sharing the methods that lead us to success on social media and the secret behind our top-performing content; we take it from Scrolller. Our goal is to start reaching at least 15 accounts per week and share the word to start measuring if this is working and meeting our success criteria.

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

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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

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

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Nick — Nearly done with the recommendation email system.
Karol — Cracking the whip on the development team
Valentin — Spending his times dreaming of ways to grow Scrolller social media traffic
Tim — Excited to
Marite — Working super hard to create our first content creator user flows
Gabriel — Pushing hard to improve our home page experience
Hamza — Nearly done with improvements to the new nav control bar
Mannan — Enjoying his vacation and wedding
Chris — Helping Scrolller make the transition from reddit content viewer to full content platform