As mentioned in our last report, we successfully landed a government digital assistance grant which was spent on Pinterest integration. Our Pro users are already seeing benefits from this. As are we as reflected in our user statistics and traffic acquired from the Pinterest platform itself

As for site updates, we really have been concentrating heavily on usability and site bugs, as well as core infrastructure, efficiency drives and server upgrades. We have successfully dropped the operating cost of the platform by 26% over the last few months, and expect a further 30% or so over the next 6 months. This is all really preparing for expansion, and potential issues that may arise due to a No deal Brexit.

The only major upgrades we have made to the site is the introduction of category navigations which has caused a significantly higher return rate for our users who categorise their images properly as their images are now found quicker and don’t just disappear into the ether of the ‘recent uploads’ column. This means the life cycle of photos is now measured in weeks instead of hours due to the volume of photos being uploaded being split into smaller categories during the viewer search process

To further increase the retention of our free users we removed all advertising from their profile pages to give them greater ownership of them and reduce distractions to visitors, this in turn increases the interaction that they receive from their uploads. We also upgraded our core operating system to PHP 7 which is the latest defacto standard. This increased the site speed significantly, by about 300%, which has helped our users worldwide see the site as easier and more friendly to use

We plan to release an update at the end of July addressing quite a few major bugs, and our next update after that will likely be September, again, this will be addressing more bugs. Once we have had 3 months of bug free operations we will then proceed to introduce new features, likely; Analytics, AMS by album, private/paid to enter albums, as well as shop and profile redesigns.

We have also been working comprehensively on offsite SEO to bring more buyers into the site. Marketing wise this will be our aim for the foreseeable future. This work ensures that our users images continue to creep up Google search for images and increases their visibility to searchers and buyers alike. It is time consuming and doesn’t happen over night, but, as you can see in the image below, significant progress is being made, with volume of impressions and clicks increasing slowly:

As the site is now so full of features, and our existing landing page doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the site works in detail, we had 3 more commissioned and launched. One for users who only want to share their photos explaining how the site works, how the paid per view system works and offering our £1 a month ad free option. Our second page is specifically for sellers who want to take advantage of our Pinterest integration, automated marketing systems and full print on demand services. And finally, our 3rd page which is specifically for buyers of images, explaining how they are printed, about our photographers and more. These have all been indexed by Google and we should see these slowly climbing the ranks as they get linked to more frequently. In turn this will bring in more buyers, and platform users.

We won’t be releasing user statistics publicly Quarterly any more for competitor analysis reasons, it’s better to be thought of as small and not a threat, than large and a threat whilst we’re in our current phase. Full Figures will Be released annually

I hope you continue to enjoy using the platform, and as always, I am available for questions via email or the forum

Tom Oswald

CEO