8 ms·

Rebuilding Your Userbase After a 60% Traffic Loss (80% Sales Loss) Disaster

44 points by camz 16y ago

jackowayed 16y ago
One major lesson to take from this: Make sure you fully understand the impact of changes you're considering for your site. It's easy to check one metric (in this case, percent of cams) and declare that that metric proves that your change won't be a problem. But you should make sure to check every metric you can get (percent of sales and percent of traffic, in this case). There's no reason you couldn't have tracked traffic to each cam and discovered that 60% of your traffic was to adult cams, right? And you may not want to track what cams each user views for privacy reasons, but you probably could have taken some anonymous data to see that adult cams make up a significant percentage of paid users' views, right?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Hindsight is always 20/20, the reason I write out this stuff is to make sure that others can learn the lessons without having to pay the price. Of course I could have done all those things, but what happened here is that after running the site for 12+ years I thought I had a good grip on this data and could bypass the measurement step. We've had a clean site policy before (until the .com crash made it impossible to afford people to oversee the site 24/7) and it worked reasonably well, I though I could simply turn back the clock on that but had missed out on a shift of the core demographics of the paying users.
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    Not trying to blame you, just confirming that it was an avoidable mistake to support my point that you should gather as much information about changes as possible to avoid similar mistakes.
maxklein 16y ago
That graph is unusual considering the title. I expected to see a graph of the traffic loss or the sales loss, but actually that graph just shows the cams available (in a diffcultto parse format). What your story seems to show is this: you're a porn site that does not know it's a porn site. People are paying because they want the dirty stuff, same as they pay for the other real porn cam sites. Perhaps yours is more palatable to them because there are no weird pop ups and other in-your-face stuff. But it's the same stuff they look for on other sites that they look for on yours. If it's about the money, should you not be aggressively exploring more in this area? Are you offering too little? Too much? Now that you are turning the titanic, what do you want out of it? You want more money? You want more geek credibility? You want to sell it off someday?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > That graph is unusual considering the title. I expected to see a graph of the traffic loss or the sales loss, but actually that graph just shows the cams available (in a diffcultto parse format). More data was to be added, specifically about the traffic. The title was changed. > Now that you are turning the titanic, what do you want out of it? Good question. No answer yet, I'm still coming to terms with all this. I've given Charles and Jan 3 months carte-blanche to do as they please, after that I'll make up my mind about what it is that I will do. > If it's about the money, should you not be aggressively exploring more in this area? I won't be doing anything on the visible side of things. > You want to sell it off someday? It may come to that, time will tell.
paraschopra 16y ago
So, you did not do calculations of the probable effect of your decision _before_ taking that decision?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Given the data available at the time, yes. But now we have more data, and much as I hate the conclusion I can't seem to escape it. edit: Hacker News, the site where when an article you wrote is posted, where you are asked questions you can get downmodded for answering them. Really guys, what's wrong with you? Can't you find it in you to even tell me why you think that answer deserves your drive-by-scorn?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
iwr 16y ago
Browsing through the webcam list (child safe mode off), every other one appears to be a bloke wanking. So what's the site's business model?
- Luyt 16y ago
  Sex sells! Depraved sex maybe even sells better. Remember Philips' V2000 video tape format? It went titsup because Philips wanted to project a 'decent image' of itself and didn't allow porn on V2000. The rest is history...
  - iwr 16y ago
    Who would want to pay to look at blokes wanking? It comes free with chatroulette. Maybe the blokes themselves are paying to have their privates shown?
    - phpnode 16y ago
      No one is paying to see blokes wanking, or at least very few are. The "wankers" represent the most paying customers, they consume the most content, but they also produce the least desirable content...
prodigal_erik 16y ago
You're getting some criticism here, but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > You're getting some criticism here That's a pretty normal state of affairs :) I'll try to mine the criticism for useful bits that give me more insight than I currently have. The collective wisdom of HN far outweighs my own and I'm very much open to suggestions at this point. > but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached. I think that's a very logical step, after all if you could not possibly be a user of your own product you are likely not the right person to determine the direction because a lack of affinity will cause you to make the wrong decisions.
gscott 16y ago
The real question is if this extra traffic is valuable, then how to monetize the blokes wanking. I would suggest a tie-up with an adult website and limit daily viewing time. The blokes wank off for free, crowdsourced, those who have a cam get to watch others for free, but those without have to pay a small fee after so many minutes (say 45 minutes a day free)
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  "The real question is... how to monetize the blokes wanking." Only on HN... :)
zazi 16y ago
> "It turns out that that 5% of the cams coincides with 60% of the traffic and close to 80% of the sales!" The traffic that each camera gets should be pretty easy to track. The site also has a top 100 cam list so it apparently does track hits to cameras. Seems to me that they should have known that 5% of their cams coincided with 60% of their traffic before hand (and whether those were adult only cameras or not).
- phpnode 16y ago
  We've only very recently been able to track things like that, but the main part of the problem has been not wanting to acknowledge the truth until now. WW.com was never intended as an adult site, but a communications platform, far pre-dating justin.tv. However, it's clear our revenues come almost entirely from the adult market, so without taking funding, that's the direction we have to take the site.
  - DanBlake 16y ago
    Regarding the "unless we take funding..." Thats not true. Its just the easier and less risky way for you. It also limits you and the site- You will eventually be known as a porn site. Easy profits now will limit big profits later.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > You will eventually be known as a porn site. Charles has some interesting ideas on how to avoid that fate. I think he may be able to deliver, time will tell. 90 days carte blanche, that's a bit of a risk to take but I've gotten to know Charles and Jan very well over the last couple of months and I fully trust they will not do anything that would embarrass me.
  - zazi 16y ago
    Ah thanks for clarifying. To me, those metrics were ones that should have been tracked from the beginning. But I understand that it is painful (and difficult) to admit when something you've built is used for something that you did not intend it to be used for. If you actually do have paying non-adult-content customers though, the battle may not be lost. I'm saying this without much knowledge on your revenue model, but instead of suddenly alienating the adult-content customers, it might be possible to let them continue to use your site while you slowly focus on giving more value to your non-adult content customers. In this way, you may be able to steer the direction of the company and substitute the revenue base in a less destructive manner.
axod 16y ago
You don't explain in detail why you decided to go back on your decision... It seems like the decision to go back to 'non-clean' was purely short term profit driven. Seems like given more time and effort, keeping it clean may well have paid off in the longer run.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  This was posted before I was ready to get it out there, so that's why there is lots of detail and more data missing. The decision to go back to 'non-clean' was basically to buy us some time to think this through given our newfound insight. Charles and Jan have some ideas that may chart a path out of this mess and I trust them enough to have my interests at heart in it too. The next couple of months will be quite interesting. > Seems like given more time and effort, keeping it clean may well have paid off in the longer run. That is a possibility, but we would not have gotten to the longer run, now we at least have a chance.
medianama 16y ago
Why don't you sell it off and do something that you & people/users like.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  It may come to that.
patio11 16y ago
While I don't know if I agree with the decision, this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it. I doubt there is anybody here who runs a public service who has not been bitten by that before. This particular issue has caused trouble for a few other startups, too. IMVU, if I remember correctly, also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I wonder how they'd measure traffic to "dirty" cams, considering that they mentioned that there's no way to figure it out except for an actual person to monitor cams 24/7.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    We're now tracking traffic to all the cams, so that's a lot easier now than it used to be, as for the monitoring, that's when we enforce the clean site policy, in that case the 'dirty' cams don't live long enough to garner substantial traffic. A minute or so at most before they're gone.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > While I don't know if I agree with the decision Which decision in particular ? (there are several) And more importantly, why ? > this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it. Yep. I'm to blame 100% here, I think my naivety really shows. > also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia. Pedophilia and anything else that is illegal has always been banned on ww.com, in fact we have a liaison with the dutch police to help catch the really bad apples. And the users that left were not vocal about it, they just left.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Which decision in particular ? (there are several) And more importantly, why ? Since you ask, and only since you ask: given the choice between "porn" and "huge revenue hit" (and laying off employees, service closure, or whatever else that entails), I would not hesitate to pick door #2. I could talk about why at length but it would be off-topic for this forum.
siculars 16y ago
tl;dr: undo what you did that persipitated the "disaster"
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The whole idea of summarizing something is to actually read it yourself first, I think you missed out on a bunch of stuff that probably should have made it in to your summary.
  - siculars 16y ago
    All I got from that post was that you reversed the decision to keep the site clean. How is that not the case?
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      I also decided to hand over the day to day management, which I think is by far the larger decision.
jacquesm 16y ago
I was going to collect a lot more data and provide more details about the future direction but this got posted before I got around to that so I'll leave it as it stands. The title here is not mine, but a replacement that I can't subscribe to 100% yet.

44 points by camz 16y ago

One major lesson to take from this: Make sure you fully understand the impact of changes you're considering for your site. It's easy to check one metric (in this case, percent of cams) and declare that that metric proves that your change won't be a problem. But you should make sure to check every metric you can get (percent of sales and percent of traffic, in this case). There's no reason you couldn't have tracked traffic to each cam and discovered that 60% of your traffic was to adult cams, right? And you may not want to track what cams each user views for privacy reasons, but you probably could have taken some anonymous data to see that adult cams make up a significant percentage of paid users' views, right?

jacquesm 16y ago
Hindsight is always 20/20, the reason I write out this stuff is to make sure that others can learn the lessons without having to pay the price. Of course I could have done all those things, but what happened here is that after running the site for 12+ years I thought I had a good grip on this data and could bypass the measurement step. We've had a clean site policy before (until the .com crash made it impossible to afford people to oversee the site 24/7) and it worked reasonably well, I though I could simply turn back the clock on that but had missed out on a shift of the core demographics of the paying users.
- jackowayed 16y ago
  Not trying to blame you, just confirming that it was an avoidable mistake to support my point that you should gather as much information about changes as possible to avoid similar mistakes.

maxklein 16y ago

That graph is unusual considering the title. I expected to see a graph of the traffic loss or the sales loss, but actually that graph just shows the cams available (in a diffcultto parse format). What your story seems to show is this: you're a porn site that does not know it's a porn site. People are paying because they want the dirty stuff, same as they pay for the other real porn cam sites. Perhaps yours is more palatable to them because there are no weird pop ups and other in-your-face stuff. But it's the same stuff they look for on other sites that they look for on yours. If it's about the money, should you not be aggressively exploring more in this area? Are you offering too little? Too much? Now that you are turning the titanic, what do you want out of it? You want more money? You want more geek credibility? You want to sell it off someday?

jacquesm 16y ago
> That graph is unusual considering the title. I expected to see a graph of the traffic loss or the sales loss, but actually that graph just shows the cams available (in a diffcultto parse format). More data was to be added, specifically about the traffic. The title was changed. > Now that you are turning the titanic, what do you want out of it? Good question. No answer yet, I'm still coming to terms with all this. I've given Charles and Jan 3 months carte-blanche to do as they please, after that I'll make up my mind about what it is that I will do. > If it's about the money, should you not be aggressively exploring more in this area? I won't be doing anything on the visible side of things. > You want to sell it off someday? It may come to that, time will tell.

paraschopra 16y ago

So, you did not do calculations of the probable effect of your decision _before_ taking that decision?

jacquesm 16y ago
Given the data available at the time, yes. But now we have more data, and much as I hate the conclusion I can't seem to escape it. edit: Hacker News, the site where when an article you wrote is posted, where you are asked questions you can get downmodded for answering them. Really guys, what's wrong with you? Can't you find it in you to even tell me why you think that answer deserves your drive-by-scorn?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

iwr 16y ago

Browsing through the webcam list (child safe mode off), every other one appears to be a bloke wanking. So what's the site's business model?

Luyt 16y ago
Sex sells! Depraved sex maybe even sells better. Remember Philips' V2000 video tape format? It went titsup because Philips wanted to project a 'decent image' of itself and didn't allow porn on V2000. The rest is history...
- iwr 16y ago
  Who would want to pay to look at blokes wanking? It comes free with chatroulette. Maybe the blokes themselves are paying to have their privates shown?
  - phpnode 16y ago
    No one is paying to see blokes wanking, or at least very few are. The "wankers" represent the most paying customers, they consume the most content, but they also produce the least desirable content...

prodigal_erik 16y ago

You're getting some criticism here, but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached.

jacquesm 16y ago
> You're getting some criticism here That's a pretty normal state of affairs :) I'll try to mine the criticism for useful bits that give me more insight than I currently have. The collective wisdom of HN far outweighs my own and I'm very much open to suggestions at this point. > but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached. I think that's a very logical step, after all if you could not possibly be a user of your own product you are likely not the right person to determine the direction because a lack of affinity will cause you to make the wrong decisions.

gscott 16y ago

The real question is if this extra traffic is valuable, then how to monetize the blokes wanking. I would suggest a tie-up with an adult website and limit daily viewing time. The blokes wank off for free, crowdsourced, those who have a cam get to watch others for free, but those without have to pay a small fee after so many minutes (say 45 minutes a day free)

roadnottaken 16y ago
"The real question is... how to monetize the blokes wanking." Only on HN... :)

zazi 16y ago

> "It turns out that that 5% of the cams coincides with 60% of the traffic and close to 80% of the sales!" The traffic that each camera gets should be pretty easy to track. The site also has a top 100 cam list so it apparently does track hits to cameras. Seems to me that they should have known that 5% of their cams coincided with 60% of their traffic before hand (and whether those were adult only cameras or not).

phpnode 16y ago
We've only very recently been able to track things like that, but the main part of the problem has been not wanting to acknowledge the truth until now. WW.com was never intended as an adult site, but a communications platform, far pre-dating justin.tv. However, it's clear our revenues come almost entirely from the adult market, so without taking funding, that's the direction we have to take the site.
- DanBlake 16y ago
  Regarding the "unless we take funding..." Thats not true. Its just the easier and less risky way for you. It also limits you and the site- You will eventually be known as a porn site. Easy profits now will limit big profits later.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > You will eventually be known as a porn site. Charles has some interesting ideas on how to avoid that fate. I think he may be able to deliver, time will tell. 90 days carte blanche, that's a bit of a risk to take but I've gotten to know Charles and Jan very well over the last couple of months and I fully trust they will not do anything that would embarrass me.
- zazi 16y ago
  Ah thanks for clarifying. To me, those metrics were ones that should have been tracked from the beginning. But I understand that it is painful (and difficult) to admit when something you've built is used for something that you did not intend it to be used for. If you actually do have paying non-adult-content customers though, the battle may not be lost. I'm saying this without much knowledge on your revenue model, but instead of suddenly alienating the adult-content customers, it might be possible to let them continue to use your site while you slowly focus on giving more value to your non-adult content customers. In this way, you may be able to steer the direction of the company and substitute the revenue base in a less destructive manner.

axod 16y ago

You don't explain in detail why you decided to go back on your decision... It seems like the decision to go back to 'non-clean' was purely short term profit driven. Seems like given more time and effort, keeping it clean may well have paid off in the longer run.

jacquesm 16y ago
This was posted before I was ready to get it out there, so that's why there is lots of detail and more data missing. The decision to go back to 'non-clean' was basically to buy us some time to think this through given our newfound insight. Charles and Jan have some ideas that may chart a path out of this mess and I trust them enough to have my interests at heart in it too. The next couple of months will be quite interesting. > Seems like given more time and effort, keeping it clean may well have paid off in the longer run. That is a possibility, but we would not have gotten to the longer run, now we at least have a chance.

medianama 16y ago

Why don't you sell it off and do something that you & people/users like.

jacquesm 16y ago
It may come to that.

patio11 16y ago

While I don't know if I agree with the decision, this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it. I doubt there is anybody here who runs a public service who has not been bitten by that before. This particular issue has caused trouble for a few other startups, too. IMVU, if I remember correctly, also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
I wonder how they'd measure traffic to "dirty" cams, considering that they mentioned that there's no way to figure it out except for an actual person to monitor cams 24/7.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  We're now tracking traffic to all the cams, so that's a lot easier now than it used to be, as for the monitoring, that's when we enforce the clean site policy, in that case the 'dirty' cams don't live long enough to garner substantial traffic. A minute or so at most before they're gone.
jacquesm 16y ago
> While I don't know if I agree with the decision Which decision in particular ? (there are several) And more importantly, why ? > this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it. Yep. I'm to blame 100% here, I think my naivety really shows. > also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia. Pedophilia and anything else that is illegal has always been banned on ww.com, in fact we have a liaison with the dutch police to help catch the really bad apples. And the users that left were not vocal about it, they just left.
- patio11 16y ago
  Which decision in particular ? (there are several) And more importantly, why ? Since you ask, and only since you ask: given the choice between "porn" and "huge revenue hit" (and laying off employees, service closure, or whatever else that entails), I would not hesitate to pick door #2. I could talk about why at length but it would be off-topic for this forum.

siculars 16y ago

tl;dr: undo what you did that persipitated the "disaster"

jacquesm 16y ago
The whole idea of summarizing something is to actually read it yourself first, I think you missed out on a bunch of stuff that probably should have made it in to your summary.
- siculars 16y ago
  All I got from that post was that you reversed the decision to keep the site clean. How is that not the case?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I also decided to hand over the day to day management, which I think is by far the larger decision.

jacquesm 16y ago

I was going to collect a lot more data and provide more details about the future direction but this got posted before I got around to that so I'll leave it as it stands. The title here is not mine, but a replacement that I can't subscribe to 100% yet.