This report is unusually late, as you can well imagine we have had a few things on our plate here at Clickasnap headquarters. What with all this Covid 19 stuff and all!

The first quarter of this year was an extremely good one for us, we had finally got the platform into a position where we could successfully scale (every £1 spent was netting £2.67 return) and we where scaling up our advertising by thousands of pounds per month utilising a formula i had put together to increase the ad spend in proportion to the revenue it would bring in over a given period of time. Unfortunately Covid hit and our ad returns dropped to a loss of £0.90 in the £. A not inconsiderable loss unfortunately! So this put paid to our scaling pretty rapidly.

Fortunately, my years of banging on about investing into the efficiency of the platform at the expense of everything else has paid off. Whilst i never envisaged a worldwide pandemic (well, i did but that’s another story) i did envisage points where funding or revenue would decrease or dry up. As it stands, we have almost a million page views per month and the costs for these vs our income is tiny. A further advantage of our business model is that 1) We are not ad revenue dependent (ad revenue having dropped 95% since Covid erupted) and 2) That we have a subscription revenue system of comparatively small amounts. Whilst we have lost some subscribers, to make a significant dent in our revenue would require a very large subset of our subscribers to leave the platform, which is possible admittedly.

In the last quarter we have made some huge improvements to the form and functionality of the platform. We have completely redesigned the users shops and simultaneous removed a significant amount of work from photographers when they were setting up products for sale. Previously, i had worked out that if a photographer had uploaded 100 images and wanted to sell them in every category it would literally take them several weeks to do this! Obviously not acceptable. So we removed the onus of product cropping from the photographer and gave it to the client. This ensures the client can get exactly what they want when purchasing an image. Some photographers may not like this, but the reality is, if you want to sell photos, you have to sell what the client wants to buy

Traffic, well that is continuing in it’s upward trajectory, this first quarter has shown a consistent 50% increase over the same quarter in 2019 and we expect this to continue through organic and referral traction. Both of which are starting to snowball, slowly, but the evidence is there.

Our next quarters plans? Well, we have dramatically reduced our ad spend, but kept a small turn over going into it so we can pick up again when we start seeing conversion rates improving. We plan on bringing out cloud storage for our Pro accounts, and as part of our new Bolt ons menu for every other user. Further to that, we will just have to see how the world treats us, we are in unprecedented times, and anything can go any way right now with little hope of forecasting it accurately!

I believe that the reduction in advertising revenue is going to bankrupt alot of online businesses, particularly photo sharing/hosting orientated ones. IF we can get Clickasnap through to the other side, however long that takes, i believe we will be in a prime position to start ‘hoovering’ up the market.

Till next quarter, stay at home and stay safe

Tom Oswald

CEO and Founder

Clickasnap