300k Registered Users 🎉 & Updates on User Experience Changes
Scrolller Weekly Update November 18th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are upcoming improvements on UI/UX, drop on ad views , pricing updates, and priorities to enhance user experience.
If you are new to the newsletter, please subscribe to keep up with our journey of building a 100 million MAU web application!
First look into Scrolller Recommendations:
To provide our users with the content they love, Scrolller has been working on its content recommendation system. With this new feature, Scrolller will suggest to our users the content that might interest them. In order to make this system perfect, we need volunteers users that might want to try this new system and validate the suggestion it produces. Your help will allow us to fine-tune this system, to produce more accurate suggestions. Click on the image or GO HERE to signup for the first look in Scrolller's content recommendation system.
User-Driven Development
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 "CODY". The summary of user feedback is as follows:
I use scrolller as a new and fresh way to get content from reddit. I'm not here for a new "social media platform" I'm here to see scrolling pictures.
I don't care to interact with anyone. so while your new features are costing you a ton of money they are providing exactly zero value for me.
I feel that you are abandoning what you describe to be what brought your site success. It took all the "extra" out of reddit. made it just simple scrollling images no comments, no arguments. That's an award winning idea. Something I'm willing to pay for.
now you are putting stuff into it which negates the good things about scrolller: no advertising, no social features, just a highly customizable image stream.
I don't need another place to go get #ads and #challenges. Right now in its current state scroller is really really good. It needs some performance enhancements. what it needs is incentives for users to sign up for premium not for investors to pay for feature they think users want.
Scrolller's Action
"CODY"
We understand your frustration with what you think will take away everything that is good about Scrolller. But unfortunately, as with everything in life, change is inevitable. We too wish we could keep Scrolller the way it was, but that means saying no to innovation, something that is at the core of any successful business.
What we can do is to make sure we create innovations in a way that doesn't take away anything from your experience of Scrolller - a highly customizable image stream with no comments and zero ads.
We understand that this is what many of our users want and we thank you for opening our minds to brainstorm the best possible way to make this happen.
And that's what we did. As you know, there are always two kinds of users and we are working hard to ensure that our new additions work well for both users.
Scrolller priorities to enhance your experience
To elaborate a bit more, here are some of the features that will make both our categories of users happy:
Tier 1
Priority features that contribute to your experience:
Performance enhancements
Ability to download quality content
Improvement in UI/UX (single column scroll vs multi-column scroll) and adding more filters to discover the content of their choice.
Content recommendations.
Ability to change the charge code.
Android / IOS application
Tier 2
Features that will add value to users that support innovation and change:
All of the above mentioned featured plus:
Ability to share their collections.
Content creation abilities
Social features as notifications, comments, ability to tag other users.
As you can see, our enhancements are geared towards making Scrolller a better experience for you. The ability to download content and the content recommendations are great ways to personalize your experience.
All we ask is for patience and understanding from your side to help us perfect our changes in a way that will keep Scrolller to be the content platform you love and hopefully, our new features will be a great way for you to explore it even more!
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
303679 → 308735
Upcoming Improvements on UI/UX
In order to make the user experience more enjoyable, our development team is working on the improvement of the UI/UX of Scrolller. While carefully designing the new UI/UX updates, we focused on the design feedback from our users. This will make sure that their pain points are resolved in this upcoming update. We are optimizing the whole UI for mobile experience as mobile users of Scrolller make up to ~80% of our traffic. This new design is targeted towards simpler, in-reach features and to highlight the content even more. We are also bringing back the most loved features from Old Scrolller with a fresh look and feel. These features have been reimagined to provide more flexibility to our users as they enjoy content on Scrolller by adjusting their experience on the go.
Updates on the Home Page:
The homepage has been reimagined with a look that is cleaner, simpler, and with easy-to-access controls. Compared to the current UI of Homepage, where mobile users have difficulty reaching the top controls as they single-handedly use the mobile device. This new user experience will allow them to use the filters and easily login/logout from anywhere within Scrolller.
We are also adding more filters that will allow users to fine-tune their content preferences as they scroll. Categories from the old scrolller have been reimagined and added to the filter tab.
Updates on Full-Screen Mode:
The cleaner and content-focused look is also reflected in the full-screen view. The title and description of the content have been moved to the top. The controls that used to be on the right side of the screen have been re-designed to be more in-access to users. Icons are completely changed to reflect their intention. The addition of the download button is a great new plus. This will allow our users to save any content on their devices.
Please let us know what are your thoughts on these upcoming changes. Your feedback on these designs will help us make them even better.
New Content Everyday:
Our team is focused on providing fresh content on Scrolller to our users. But, as we keep on adding the data the storage costs start to increase and it is more difficult to manage this huge sum of data footprint. Currently, Scrolller is hosting over ~24TB of content. With the scrappers having the ability to add 52 GB of data to our servers every day.
We started to brainstorm on how we can provide the most engaging and fresh content to our users. One solution that we thought will be best is that we start to get rid of old data on scrolller and replace it with fresh data. The question is how can it be determined what data should be replaced with newer content?
We came to a conclusion that since there is a huge amount of data present on our servers. There might be a large amount of data that has never been served to our users. Based on this assumption we started to compile the following information on data:
Content that has never been favorited
Content that is not in a collection that is followed by any user.
Content that is oldest, and has never been served on scrolller or is simply less engaging.
Based on these conditions we are finding out the potential data to replace. We are still refining the process of how we will replace this legacy data with a fresh one. Please send us your feedback on what you think about this strategy.
User Experience Issues - Resolved:
Search on categories page is case sensitive.
Leaderboard podium to display collection name.
Highlight user rank on the leaderboard.
Disable fetching content from hosts that are experiencing downtime.
Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts
Unlocking Categories plan (Testing)
Recording User Experience Metrics (Testing)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Revenue
Drop in Ad Revenue
Scrolller saw a massive decline in revenue from its advertising partners this week. This approximately ~40% less revenue from advertisements is due to an issue that reduced the flow of their ads on the front end. Our team started to look into this issue at the topmost priority. The below image shows the ad views reduced to half of what they used to be.
Investigation Results:
The initial investigation showed that this happened right after we turned off the advertisements for 24 hours when Scrolller was down. As we turned it back on after all ads were moved to a new server, they never reached their full potential. On further investigation, we found 3 major root causes of this drop.
We found that there was an artificial limit imposed by the NGINX on the new server that was limiting the number of ads being served per session.
We also found that some outdated ads were trying to load on the frontend but faced 404 errors as media didn't exist.
The server on which ads are currently hosted is also serving as a cache for our storage servers. This server is overflown with the requests that may cause the ad request from Scrolller front end to fail.
Both of these issues combined resulted in a drop in ad views, which resulted in a drop in revenue.
Fix for this issue:
We have removed the artificial limit imposed by NGINX on ad serves per session. We also updated the database of ads to reflect reality and removed any ads that were throwing 404 errors.
One more fix that we want to do is to move all ads to a new server that will only be responsible for serving them in an efficient manner.
We are carefully monitoring the impact of these new fixes on the ad views. We believe that this will help us regain the full potential of ad views on Scrolller.
Pricing Updates for Premium Scrolller
The new pricing updates will be implemented from the month of December. All new users will be onboarded according to this new pricing. Scrolller has started to update the pricing page to reflect what our premium customers will benefit from as we launch our new updates. The pricing update comes with a promise from Scrolller, that our premium customers will get value for every penny paid. All new features that are listed are either in a development phase or are planned for the next releases.
Offer for Current Monthly Premium Users:
To accommodate our current monthly premium users we will provide them with an offer to update their premium account to yearly on the old price that is $20 only. If they don't accept this offer by the end of next month they will automatically be charged monthly according to the new pricing update that is $2.98 per month.
Incentives for Content Creators:
Scrolller believes in giving back to the users that are helping us grow. We are planning on developing a new system where our premium users will be able to upload their own content. Scrolller will pay them a fair share of the revenue generated from the Ads that will be displayed on their collections. We are working on refining this idea and will share details on it in our newsletter.
Please let us know in the comments, what you think about this plan of giving back to users and pricing updates.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)
Bitcoin
Paypal
High-Risk Payment Processor
Social Traffic
0.4% → 0.7% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team Update
This week, our single-person-army outreach team keeps losing traffic & reach on the Facebook front while still working strongly on Twitter traffic. Last week, we had a 55% increase in traffic coming from this front, this week we were able to keep increasing this number by a 9% increase, which picks up a stable growth.
The team established the goal to reach 10k people entering the Scrolller website per month coming from their work, once properly measured. So far, the NSFW Twitter front is being of great help to reach this objective.
Social Traffic Update:
Our overall traffic from social media has decayed a little for this week, this is because of losing traffic on the Facebook front & recovering part of that lost traffic with the Twitter increase we are still experiencing. This translates as a little decay.
Total Social Sessions 16,396 → 15,253 (6.9% decrease)
FB & TW Sessions 4,272 → 4,073 (4.6% decrease)
Currently, the team can't make progress on Facebook as they used to, that's why we are looking for different social media managers that are really close to being hired & joining the Scrolller team.
NSFW Content
This week, our outreach team noticed that some of the best-performing posts were related to a specific kind of content that seemed to be liked a lot by users who engaged with it.
That's why they are currently testing if this content really gives better results, or if they were just some viral posts as any good content can have.
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 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 — Working hard to provide our users with the functionality to download the content.
Karol — Dealing with Ad view issues, working on providing our users with the fastest experience.
Valentin — Building a sustainable funnel for redirecting social media users to join scrolller.
Tim — Solving the issues to provide our users with the content recomendations.
Matt — Having a small meltdown as he continues to understand large amount of data on scrolller.
Mannan — Working with Chris to increase our revenue, so we can provide our users with the latest and greatest new features.
Chris — Working with investors and hiring 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
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Content Recommendation System (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (In Progress)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
New native advertisements (Done)
Categories page for SFW collections (Done)
User Generated Collections: Leaderboard**(Done)**
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!