(I'm getting tired at looking at the same boring marketing stock photos, so I think we'll switch to pictures of lemurs from now on. Ring-tailed lemurs are of course the best type of lemur!)
August Roundup
The Good
As I mentioned in last month's update, as August rolled around I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the day-to-day site operations and was starting to turn my attention towards improvements. These improvements—coupled with a surge in traffic—really put a lot of strain on the servers throughout the month of August. All in all it was a good month for the intro video business. Here are some of the feel-good metrics for August:
- Revenue was up about 44% over July
- Traffic was up around 34% over July
- Revenue per visit was up about 8% over July
Really that first stat is a combination of the next two, but I think it's worth splitting them out since most of my attention is focused on site improvements in the near term.
The Bad
With the increase in traffic, I had three major outages on the render servers in August. That, when paired with the extra support requests, really sucked up a lot of the spare time I had available to work on more site updates. I'm really happy with the overall stats for the month ("best month ever" doesn't mean too much two months in, but it's still nice!), but I feel like I made very little progress in switching over to the new preview render pipeline.
The Ugly
14:01—the average preview render time in August was 14 minutes. The server outages really hurt this number. The median was 3:04, much more in line with last month's numbers. After pushing some updates that increased the number of previews getting made earlier in the month, I noticed that the conversion rate gets worse as the preview-render-time increases. As a point of comparison. The preview render time on videos that actually went on to get purchased was only 3:40. I'm working on a much longer blog post that will go further into the IntroCave sales funnel.