

Torbit Moves Towards Free To Help Web Businesses Turn Speed Into Revenue - joshfraser
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/with-growth-surging-torbit-moves-towards-free-to-help-web-businesses-turn-speed-into-revenue

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ccamrobertson
Congratulations to Josh, Jon and the Torbit crew, impressive set of customers.
Love the Slideshare embedded in the article.

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joshfraser
Thanks Cameron. We're hoping to share more data in the future.

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ssebro
That's an interesting powerpoint at the bottom of the techcrunch article.

I see your argument that slower page loads leads to less engagement and higher
bounce rates, and I'm somewhat skeptical - how do you know that your data
isn't saying that more engaging websites are faster because they're more
engaging?

If being engaging is correlated with delivering more value, they're likely
more profitable and more able to invest in higher quality engineering &
infrastructure than other sites. This would likely lead to decreased load
times. In other words, how do you know the cause from the effect?

I think the only way to make the argument you're trying to make is to compare
each website with itself when loaded slower.

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joshfraser
Sure, correlation does not imply causation. I think most of our customers are
smart enough to understand that.

The engagement charts are typically broken down for each site so that they are
compared with themselves. It turns out, in both cases there is a strong
correlation between performance and the business metrics you care about
(bounce rate, conversion, time on site, # pages viewed, etc).

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dcaldwell
I thought one of the last sentences was pretty interesting. I've definitely
been noticing more websites with larger images - Square, Desk.com, etc. I'd
love to know how that's affecting these websites and if it's worth it in those
instances to give up speed for the marketing advantages that higher quality
images give.

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ssebro
What's the difference between your site optimizer and cloudflare's
optimization?

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joshfraser
I can't speak for Cloudflare, but I can tell you a few of the things we've
done to make Site Optimizer awesome. A big differentiator for us is our focus
on browser-specific optimizations. For example, if you visit a page in Chrome
we'll swap out the images for WebP versions. WebP is about half the size of
JPEG but looks just as good. We've also developed a lot of cutting edge
optimizations for mobile that are unique to Torbit. We're also able to
leverage the data we get from Insight to make our Site Optimization service
better as well.

