Battling Ad-block without pissing off users and other updates 5/17
Turns out you can earn more money and communicate a positive image for our product in 1 simple update.
Welcome to the 5th weekly update from scrolller
Last week we mentioned our plan to de-emphasize NSFW content in order to get higher-tier advertisers and earn more revenue. Some users reached out and seemed worried we planned to go the way of Tumblr and remove that content completely. This couldn't be further from the truth, our goal is to handle this like Reddit or Twitter. The NSFW content exists and people can get to it via a search engine, social, or referral but otherwise, its real estate in the application is minimized where possible and designed in a way that it can be toggled easily when logged in.
Making that switch successfully will put Scrolller in the best long-term position to continue delivering an excellent content experience to all of our users.
User Accounts (139770 → 150190)
User account growth continues but at a slightly slower pace than the previous week. I was expecting to be able to report an increase in sign up's, but we were not able to launch the pro-metric advertisements last week because of a blocker. By next week it should be done and we can expect to see an increase in account creation.
Even with the boost that pro-metric advertisements might offer, our account creation rate is behind on where we need to be to hit our 1 million user account goal. We need to continue to innovate with our product and systems to push us from 1500 to 3500 new accounts a day.
In the social traffic and update sections, we discuss some potential ways we could improve the account creation numbers.
Revenue
Scrolller needs to continue to work towards sustainability as a business so we can continue to improve scrolller. Advertisements offered a quick way to improve the revenue system and continue to bring in revenue, but over time it started dropping as Ad-block software started to remove our advertisements. In order to improve the situation, we implemented an anti-AD Block system. If your AD Block is on, we will inform you that by whitelisting us in your AD Block you can help us keep Scrolller free, or you can join premium users.
We hope that this will both help improve advertising revenue and increase the number of premium subscriptions. Along with this update are a number of fixes to our payment systems and registration system.
Above you can see the effect Adblock has had on our advertising revenue over time. It has been eating at our revenue, thankfully premium has filled the gap.
Social Traffic (0.6 → 0.6)
There has been little to no change in the breakdown of social traffic to our site. Last week we were expecting to have the pro-metric advertisements launched and expected that to boost the amount of social sharing, but that wasn't finished in time for this update.
An easy way for us to start growing our social traffic would be to start posting in social media groups links to content on scrolller. We already know which content does the best and have a large selection of content from a wide area of different categories. Doing this automatically would make it easy to spread scrolller links and get more traffic.
General Update
Better Project Organization in Github
Our GitHub issues list has been growing considerably recently, with both features and improvements. It can sometimes be difficult to determine where we should apply our efforts.
We've spent some time trying to address this through the proper use of labels. Each of our issues has associated labels for the severity of the issue, which parts of the system are involved, whether it concerns our premium users, and more. This isn't a quick fix, but hopefully will develop over time and help us become more effective in prioritizing the issues to address and improving the Scrolller experience.
Account Registration and Login Issues
In response to our user’s notifications about the displayed message "Unable to connect to server" when creating an account or trying to log into an existing one I've fixed the displayed message so that it reflects why login or register didn't work. We will be better able to respond to user complaints and solve issues that are affecting our login and registration.
Content Recommendation
We have 13 million favorites, 140 thousand collections, and 72 million pieces of content on scrolller currently. That is a lot of data that we can use to recommend content to our users in a way that will maximize the chance that you can find the content you like quickly. Even with all of this data, our system isn't set up to attribute most user app interactions to specific users. This makes it hard to build an End to End content recommendation system that can help optimize for individual users.
Regardless I've been able to stitch together a system and will have some early content recommendation system prototyped later this week. Expect to see some examples on next week’s updates. This system is going to be important for the two main content recommendation-based features we'd like to build.
Road Map
This week
[Feature] Update Content Reporting System
Collect Emails from older accounts that don't have emails
[Issue] Account registration bug "Unable to connect to the server"
[Issue] Login Error - "Could not connect to database" at wrong password
Refactor Gallery View/Infinite Scroll
[Issue] Video not loading
Combine auto-scroll and slideshow functionality
Refactor to use icons from NPM package
Improved Tracking for Premium conversion funnel, Community engagement, and CPA advertisements
Test the Ad-block mitigation strategy