I'm ignorant (honest) in how to build, run and grow a community. Sure, I've got experience - loads of people do. However every community is different. Ever lived in the east coast of the US, then moved out west? Or vice versa? You get what I'm saying: culture, values, modes of interaction, norms...it's all different. We may (those of us who are, anyway) be all Americans...but, I'm a Californian first an American, second.
Most folks I've met feel the same way.
What's this got to do with FunAdvice? Well, if you read our blog...the last post talked about how overall traffic is down. Perhaps that's a good thing. Retention, as we define it, is still higher than ever and growing...wow. What's that mean?
For me, personally, it means that I'm still clueless: I would have thought constant growth in *new* traffic would increase retention, where a decrease in new visitors would decrease overall retention, as the fractional value of new visitors that convert to regular members goes down (given that it is a consistent percentage of new visitors overtime). Is that egg on my face? One sec, lemme grab a napkin.
Better. So where does this leave us? Well, there was a Google study (am I saying that too often to too many people?) they did in researching the impact of latency on their audience...fascinating stuff. What they found was that people who experienced (5%) of their audience a "slower Google" over 3 weeks conducted less searches, over the next three weeks, than the average Google user. Yikes!
Google is a brand worth $100 million dollars, according to some media pundits. That's big, in case you're wondering. There are also studies that suggest simply putting the Google logo on other search results (Bing / Yahoo / etc) will improve the perception of relevance, even if those are *not* Google search results. Wow.
Two issues, then: one is that if your brand is powerful...it matters. The other one is that nothing is more powerful a predictor on visitor behavior than site speed. Yuck. In other words: if FunAdvice works fast, we're more likely to pick up more heavy users of our system...if we work slow, we're *less* likely. Thus it could be the uptick in retention is a function of our increased speed (as we got faster with less overall new traffic to the site).
I'm not an engineer, so, I can't do anything about the speed. We are working on it, though (have you ever thought a website was "too fast"? Me neither).
Second, the "brand" issue...what does FunAdvice stand for? Well, if you read our about page...we spell it out pretty clearly. I spent this morning reading the blogs of some competitors (I've mentioned them here before) and looking at the complaints they were getting. Well, we're not perfect here, either: but we'll try to do better. And, feel free to call me on it, if we don't improve: I'm willing to listen, I won't bite your head off, AND, I'll thank you for it.