
Rebuilding Your Userbase After a 60% Traffic Loss (80% Sales Loss) Disaster - camz
http://jacquesmattheij.com/When+your+userbase+gets+away+from+you,+make+something+people+want,+indeed
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maxklein
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
> 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.

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jackowayed
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
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
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.

------
patio11
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.

~~~
jacquesm
> 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
_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.

~~~
jacquesm
Ok, I agree with you in fact. The thing is that Charles and Jan have ideas
about how to structure the site in such a way that I can live with it and I'm
willing to believe them, so I've given them 90 days to prove that this can be
done.

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.

------
prodigal_erik
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
> 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.

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iwr
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
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
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
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...

------
zazi
> "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
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
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
> 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.

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

~~~
jacquesm
It may come to that.

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gscott
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
_"The real question is... how to monetize the blokes wanking."_

Only on HN... :)

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

~~~
jacquesm
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?

------
jacquesm
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.

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axod
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
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.

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

~~~
jacquesm
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
All I got from that post was that you reversed the decision to keep the site
clean. How is that not the case?

~~~
jacquesm
I also decided to hand over the day to day management, which I think is by far
the larger decision.

