🛠Sorting Out the Issues with the Sort Feature & Other Updates
Scrolller Weekly Update December 5th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are Content updation strategy, Solutions to resolve sorting issues, and resolving drop in ad views.
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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 "DANE". The summary of user feedback is as follows:
Have you guys thought of allowing users to make multiple collections. So, instead of collections being just a public version of your favorites, you could have different collections for different things and stuff
Scrolller's Action
"DANE"
We really appreciate you thinking about this feature and suggesting it to us. We would like to let you know that Scrolller has already added this feature to its roadmap. We will prioritize this feature as soon we are done with launching exclusive features for premium users and enhancements to the user experience. Our UI/UX designer has started to work on a couple of ideas that we will share with our users for feedback. As a user-driven development focus, any design gets approved by Scrolller community before it gets implemented.
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
313641 → 319519
User Experience Metrics
Scrolller team is fully focused on improving the user experience on Scrolller for our users. The user experience metrics that we created are helping us in tracking our progress towards this goal. We are sharing a couple of metrics on which we have seen significant improvement in the last couple of weeks.
Bounce Rate
Scrolller's bounce rate is important because it tells us how well people are — or more importantly, aren’t — engaging with content or user experience.
Bounce rate is calculated when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. More specifically, a website’s bounce rate measures how many visitors leave a page without performing a specific action.
Scrolller bounce rate has dropped significantly after the performance tweaks that helped in faster load times. This shows that more people are now engaging with our content and are enjoying the user experience.
Outage Duration
Outages are killers of a great user experience as the Scrolller is only good when it is useable. Our users cannot enjoy the content while Scrolller is down. During the last couple of weeks, our outage duration was on the higher end. The cause of this increase in outage duration was an error on the database side that crashed during peak load times. It needed to be restarted and often times the development team was not available to execute the task. Our development team figured out the root cause of it and resolved the problem. The below graph shows that the user experience degraded due to an increase in outage times and now it is returning back to normal. The total available for this week remained at 99.909%. What does success look like for Scrolller: 0 Minutes of an outage.
Problems with DAU / MAU
While tracking the Number of sessions we saw a 4.6% increase from the last period. The same pattern was represented in DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly active users). The issue with these numbers is that analytics cannot associate all sessions correctly to the same user, which means that if a returning user visits Scrolller in incognito/private mode it is represented as a unique new user.
This data has alot of noise and needs to be refined before it can be used as a reliable user experience metric. We have started to implement a new tag that will allow us to mark all incognito sessions and we can easily filter them out from data.
Sorting Issues on Collections
Sort being one of our most used features on Scrolller is not working for our users for some time now.
This important feature is currently dependent on the Scrapper. The sorting stops working if the scrapper is not working.
Potential Solutions
Our team started to investigate how we can make this important feature up at all times for our users. The team came up with 2 potential solutions that will resolve the problem.
Enable offline sorting by caching the New and Top posts so that the users can use this feature even if the scrapper is offline. (Low Effort, High Resource Utilization)
Remove the dependency of the sort from the scrapper completely and deploy it as a separate microservice. (High Effort, Low Resource Utilization)
Solutions Evaluation
When we evaluated both solutions on the basis of the effort needed to implement the solution and the resources utilization for its working, we found that the latter was a permanent fix while the former would have resolved the problem for now but will cause various issues as scrolller data grows. The team has started working on the second fix. By next we will have the monolith scrapper divided into multiple microservices. The microservices architecture will eliminate a single point of failure and will bring resiliency to Scrolller.
The below graph represents our top 5 features in the last 7 days, which shows Sorting is the most highly used feature on Scrolller. It is used even used more than our popular features "Favorites" and "Enable NSFW".
The most used sort methods are also represented in the following graph. Sort by top is clearly a winner. We are planning to add more sorts and filters to our collections that will make the user experience more enjoyable.
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.
User Experience Issues - Resolved:
Content Tiles not loading properly.
Unable to open a direct link to content on Scrolller
Error on delete account from the account page.
Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts
Recording User Experience Metrics (Testing)
Content Recommendation (Testing)
Unlocking Categories plan (Improvements)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Revenue
Drop-in Ad Revenue - Resolved
We were so focused on finding errors that caused the drop in ad revenue inside Scrolller that we didn't think about external influences on Ad Revenue. After all the fixes we did we didn't see a significant increase in Ad revenue. That brought our attention to the traffic going toward our Native Ad partners. We observed that we started to send nearly double traffic to our ad partner but the revenue being generated from it dropped to almost 1/3. We reached out to them and found out that we did start to send them more traffic but we were sending it to campaigns with poor performance. The campaigns that were dedicated for us and should have brought more revenue started to get fewer clicks, whereas the optional campaigns were getting most of the clicks. For ~35000 Clicks we were only able to generate ~$600 in revenue. The below graph represents the Clicks as compared to the payout we are receiving against it.
Preventive Measures:
In order to make sure that this type of incidence doesn't occur again, our development team made a basic Ad Control System. Previously every Ad was showing up equally in the order of the newest affiliate first. Now we have the ability to assign priority to our affiliate Ads. In this way, we can control which Ads will show up first and more often on the Scrolller.
Please let us know in the comments if you know about a better ad network that has good ECPM and works with NSFW sites.
Content Updates
Scrolller has a massive amount of data stored on its servers. Scrolllers' goal is to be a go-to place for every content lover on the planet. To achieve this goal we need to provide the most engaging and quality content on our platform. The first target to make space for this quality content is to remove the least engaging content from Scrolller.
It was not an as easy a task as we thought. Our team came up with a plan in order to find and remove this content.
Go back to early Scrolller posts.
Find which ones are not favorited.
Cross-reference to see that the Collections they come from also have not been liked.
Move forward in time to check that no posts from that collection are favorited at a later stage.
Following these steps, we found that a total of ~11% of existing data on Scrolller can be removed and replaced with new engaging content.
Once we remove this large amount of data we will start working on the next step that is to upload the most engaging content and fresh content on Scrolller.
How we are going to find this most engaging content? That's a plan for the next newsletter.
Let us know in the comments what you think about this plan. What sort of content would you like to see on Scrolller.
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
0.8% → 0.7% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team Update
This week, our single-person-army outreach team keeps dedicating time to our recent NSFW channels & our posts on Facebook dropped to zero, till the new social media manager hire comes into play soon.
Social Traffic Update:
Our overall traffic from social media has decayed just a little bit for this week, and the outreach team believes this is because of the Thanksgiving holidays that some of our American followers & visitors of social channels might be celebrating. Which translated into:
Total Social Sessions 17,240→ 16,607 (3.6% decrease)
FB & TW Sessions 4,418 → 4,261 (3.5% decrease)
The team looks forward to the hire of one of the multiple social media managers that are close to being hired and joining the Scrolller team. So they can strengthen our Facebook front again.
NSFW Content
Our outreach team is currently keeping the same strategy, keep posting the top-performing content of our website, and making that reach the social channels for other users to get engaged with it. And so far, seems to be picking up stable, organic growth & grabbing the interest of the users out there.
Reddit Test Starting
Our team finally prepared an account with a good amount of karma to start making some promising Reddit tests and check if this platform might be a good outreach tool.
The team posted the Scrolller version of more than 30 threads, which after 2-3 days, led to 1,313 visits to our website.
This is encouraging so far! What do you think? Would it be cool to have a Scrolller official subreddit? Please let us know in the comments.
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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 — Thanks to Nick, premium users will be able to enjoy the exclusive features soon.
Karol — Basic Ad distribution system done and dusted. Working on making sure Sorting is working for everyone.
Valentin — Creating new opportunities for Scroller to grow its user base.
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 — Brainstorming on new features, Testing the next release for Scrolller.
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)
New native advertisements (Done)
Categories page for SFW collections (Done)
User Generated Collections: Leaderboard**(Done)**
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Until next time, happy Scrollling!
Please resolve the download issue. I left reddit when they got rid of the download function. Same with PH. Now other nsfw sites are getting rid of it. Id hate to leave you guys, because I see a great future for you.