User Generated Collections and Expanding Premium Popups
This weeks update details some major moves from us on improving revenue and increasing user engagement
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User Accounts
190261 → 198774 (Next week we celebrate 200k users)
In the previous week, we were able to test the hypothesis from last week’s newsletter, which was 'Our user account creation remains stable only because of our growth in traffic'. We effectively turned off growth for our website by disabling hotlinking. Hotlinking is when a website links to an image/video that is hosted on another website so that the image is embedded into the web page.
We had found some evidence that a lot of our server traffic was from websites other than Scrolller. Having had issues with overloaded servers during peak times, we thought it was a good idea to block hotlinking. Turns out it wasn’t so great. As a result, our avg month on month user growth dropped from 4.4% to 2.5%, representing on average 3-6,000 fewer users daily as compared to last week. You can see the start of last week via the graph above starting at the red line.
This drop-in of new users can clearly be seen in both the premium sign-ups and our number of new accounts daily. A month ago we had a similar drop in daily user accounts that coincided with a similar drop in user growth. We have since started to allow hotlinking again and look forward to seeing user growth return.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Dev Testing)
Content Recommendation (Back Log)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Continuing our theme of building our premium subscription business (don't worry people interested in advertising, we will get to that in the next couple of months). Today we are talking about our new premium CTA's. Our first attempt at a premium CTA was the ad-block mitigation popup. This helped grow our daily new subscriptions by 50% and only showed up for ~10-20% of our users.
These new popups will be shown to nearly all of our users and so we have spent some time designing the triggers so that they would not be too aversive for our users. Of course, if you are premium then you will never see these popups anyway.
To design these triggers we looked into our user data and tried to better understand what metrics best show how active a user is on our platform. The idea is that more active users are more likely to convert to premium, than non-active users. Below are our current triggers for this premium popup. These triggers definitely will trigger multiple times for many users, so to reduce its spamminess we will limit these popups to show only once every three days.
Have an opinion on our new premium popups? Comment below to share your thoughts.
Triggers:
#1: Viewed over 100 items anywhere in Scrolller (Fullscreen, Subreddits)
#2: Every 15 likes we will show a popup
Road Map for Growth in Revenue:
Refactored and improved payment system (In Dev Testing)
All user Direct call to action pop-up (In Progress)
Ad Network Mediation System (Blocked)
Social Traffic
0.6 → 0.6
Our social accounts are 2 weeks old now and we have been good about posting new content on a regular basis. The engagement has not done much except for Instagram where we are growing, but still not at the pace we need for our goal.
In an effort to change this we have added social media buttons to the hamburger menu and are currently working on automation for our Instagram account. We hope both will have a dramatic impact on growth for each of our social media accounts. Adding to our ability to communicate with scrolller users and potential users.
On a related front, we are looking into adding the feature for users to create their own "collections", which is our word for a subreddit. This has been brought up in many conversations I've had with users and potential investors. The basic idea is to let users build their own collection (subreddit), add their own description/title, add and create tags, make collections discoverable, and allow users to follow those collections.
Other than giving users what they have wanted for a while now, our team believes that this would offer scrolller a powerful forcing function for people to start sharing and creating collections. Incentivizing active users to share their collections with others. Recreating some of the magic that powered Tumblr's growth.
Road Map for Growth in Social Traffic:
Add Social Media Links to Menu (Launching)
Instagram Follow + Comment + Like Automation (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (Research)
Weekly Road Map
Admin Panel Update (Dev Testing)
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)
Categories page for SFW collections (In Progress)
Email Verification (In Progress)
New native advertisements (In Progress)
Scrolller Figma Clone (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (Blocked)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)
Instead of preventing hotlinking maybe you could try adding a watermark to the image/video to drive more growth. Doing it serverside will allow you to add the watermark only when it's outside scrolller. A/B testing different watermarks may help to increase growth.
Instead of preventing hotlinking maybe you could try adding a watermark to the image/video to drive more growth. Doing it serverside will allow you to add the watermark only when it's outside scrolller. A/B testing different watermarks may help to increase growth.