Rebuilding Your Userbase After a 60% Traffic Loss (80% Sales Loss) Disaster
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that's not possible I will probably have to step out of it completely. I'm not going to make a moralistic judgment on what end users of a service can or can not do if the service is to survive or not, after all that will affect everybody, the good guys and girls included but I will not want to be associated with the service if the center of gravity shifts further in a direction that I'm not comfortable with.
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.
So what's the site's business model?
Maybe the blokes themselves are paying to have their privates shown?
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).
Easy profits now will limit big profits later.
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.
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.
All the best though. Would love to see you turn it around and make it to what you want it to be.
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)
Only on HN... :)
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?
The title here is not mine, but a replacement that I can't subscribe to 100% yet.
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.
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.