ClickASnap quarterly report March 2017

As we continue to develop and grow we have to look at structuring ourselves as a larger and larger company. Part of this is increasing the reporting of our core data sets to our shareholders, and if they’re interested, our users. So this will be the first report of many that will be released once a quarter detailing just what’s happened behind the scenes at ClickASnap.

General Site Overview:

The first quarter of 2017 has been incredibly eventful. As many of you are no doubt aware, we launched our ecommerce systems just prior to December and this broke the site slightly over the Christmas period due to holidays and all the usual chaos that surrounds this time of year. Prior to launching this new site we had asked our users in the forum what they would like to see added into the site with the ecommerce. This included a huge amount of new features and we managed to get most of them in. Since the 1st January there has been 11 minor site updates and one major site update. The minor updates included over 50 site tweaks and features, one of which sped up the site form and function by over 500% whilst reducing our server loads significantly as you can see in the graphic below:

clickasnap Main server load
Main server load

As you can see the load on the web facing servers was hugely reduced, this in turn meant a much faster loading site, and actually means that our existing infrastructure should be able to handle 4 million users per month before we have to upgrade anything.

On March 6th we released a major update that we have been working on since January, this is our new feed

clickasnap sharing feed

As can be seen it is a significant improvement on our previous beta feed, and an even greater improvement on the original Alpha site feed. The idea behind this feed is to give users the ability to share their subscribers content to new audiences, share statuses, share links to other sites that interest them and so on. Reach is not limited like Meta’s, therefore any post reaches all the users subscribers. This feature alone means that a user with 10,000 Meta likes only needs 100 ClickASnap subscribers to reach the same number of users for free. We do not intend on changing this, and would rather allow the users to dictate what they see in their feed by following/unfollowing users than ClickASnap dictating what users see in their feed. The Feed addition has led to a huge increase in usage of the site and a massive uptick in interaction as users discover old and new content as well as new users.

Whilst it was an incredibly difficult decision to make, we had to make a decision to clamp down on image quality on the site. Whilst originally we did say we were never going to delete users content (outside of blatant disregard for TOS) Unfortunately a few of our users were uploading any random junk in the quest for paid views and this had to be addressed. We want to be a high quality hosting site that users flock to to buy art, and advertisers want to be seen on, and the only way this could be done was to remove content that was of particularly low quality. This change was taken well by the site users and has meant an instant increase in quality photographic content.

We have a large amount of additional features we plan to bring into this aspect of the platform including monetising it further with in house advertising consisting of promoted accounts and promoted images.

Quarterly site statistics:

The numbers! It has been a fairly slow start to the year, with almost the entirety of January being devoted to fixing the platforms bugs and this resulted in a decline in users as the site was repaired. Unfortunately such things are an issue with live beta testing sites like this. However, during the first quarter of 2017 we added 789 new users bringing our total signed up users to 7,739, who between them  brought in 121,645 users who viewed 2,478,648 Million images. We have had 40,179 photos uploaded bringing our total on platform images to 232,794.

Our bounce rate is consistently below 1% meaning 99 out of every 100 people that come to the platform view at least 2 images, in fact, 99% of people who visit the platform view an average of 19.83 pages and have a retention time of 8 minutes and 47 seconds.

These numbers are on the low side but the averages have been dragged down by the performance of the site in January and the early parts of February. To give a comparison between January and March is a more accurate scope of the sites ongoing growth:

As you can see there is a huge improvement in our key statistics over a period of a mere 12 weeks.

And below is a weekly snapshot of the sites referral traffic (eg traffic from Meta/twitter etc)

A couple of figures to take particular note of are the pages/session, bounce rate and Avg. Session duration. In our particular case you can see that people often spend upto 25 minutes on the site in any one particular session, viewing in excess of 50 images. This shows that the design, layout and operation of the site is extremely effective in encouraging users to view more content, this is also helped greatly by the fantastic content that we have available on the site for users to view. As confidence in the platform grows this will also encourage these users to make purchases of the content that is made available for sale by the users, using our £3 a month seller accounts.

Marketing:

Whilst we currently do not have any paid marketing in progress (finances are currently better spent on software and platform features, the argument being the better the site the more likely people will spread it using word of mouth) We do carry out significant ‘free’ marketing activities. These primarily consist of weekly blog posts to increase organic search rankings, Twitter and Meta being the main methods of traffic attraction. We currently have 188 blog posts, 5,000+ highly targeted twitter followers and 1,200 Meta likes. We measure the effectiveness of these using trackable links. This year we have increased our daily inbound traffic clicks from an average of 12 a day in January to an average of 113 a day in by the end of March. This means our free traffic generation is bringing in approximately 3,500 new visitors per month saving us in the region of £48,000 per year in advertising (based on average cost per click for display advertising at £1 per click). Our aim is to continue growing these traffic sites organically with the aim of 500 inbound clicks per day by year end, netting a yearly saving of circa £186,000.

Conclusion, next quarters plans: 

During our next quarter the following is to be completed and released:

  1. Marketplace home page, this will be a massive refinement on the marketplace landing page making it more compelling to buy products that are for sale
  2. Product search systems to make it easier to find products that you wish to buy
  3. A user shop, this will display all of your ‘for sale’ items in one easy place, which can be shared and browsed by your consumers
  4. Marketplace ‘open access’ this will allow users to play with the marketplace before committing t0 the £3 a month fee
  5. User profiles are to be updated and completed
  6. Free downloads are to be accessible with just an email address rather than having to sign up to the site to receive them, allowing easier downloads
  7. We will be limiting uploads of free accounts to 7 images per day, this is to help reduce the proliferation of junk photos from some new users
  8. £1 a month no ads subscription. Fed up of ads? Sign up to this to browse the platform ad free
  9. An automated algorithm that will enable new users to find people to follow to increase the following of existing users and to integrate new users into the platform more wholly. There will also be an option to promote your account through this system to increase the amount of followers you have faster.
  10. Addition of portrait photo printing options to the marketplace
  11. Various minor bug fixes

Once the above is complete we will be leaving beta and starting the long process of marketing the site across the western world. Whilst we will still bring in further refinements to the site the bulk of the large development work will be completed by this point. Part of this marketing exercise will involve Mike Browne producing content and promotional videos for the site which will be launched onto his YouTube channel to his 200,000 subscribers. The first of these is due out in May to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Mikes endorsement of the platform.

We still have Series A shares available and if you believe in the company and would like to own a part of it please contact us at invest@clickasnap.com

Thanks for taking the time to read this and being a part of this rapidly growing and exciting world first platform. As always if you have any questions you may contact me at tom@clickasnap.com

Tom Oswald

CEO

Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stories

More posts from our blog!

Looking for something?

Search our blog

Search

Blog

Choose from our categories

Categories

Get in Touch