If you build it, will they come?
We went live with a new site for errnio this week
It wasn’t a radical break from the previous site, but it’s a site we can now call home(page).
More importantly, it’s a planet in the solar system of our brand and concept “Gesture Engagement and Monetization”
We built the site so we have a face to the world, a proper home for our brand. It’s meant to pave the way for a new concept in mobile web engagement and monetization — a market we call “gesture monetization”.
We re-built it because we didn’t like the way we set it up last time, code and all. This time we desgined a responsive simulator and a truly mobile first site, for our mobile first market.
Above all that we built it as a way to focus on interacting with the world of publishers directly, through a self-serve platform.
See, the thing with platforms is that they work. If you build them,
publishers will come.
We get this question from a lot of people we talk to: colleagues, partners, investors. It comes in different variations, but the basic question is: does self-serve really work? If you build a self-serve platform, will it get the publishers to sign up? The answer is yes.
But don’t kid yourself. When it’s finally started to take shape, that’s when we felt our publishers were reacting and signing up. The way to think about it is not only the flow within the website — from visit, through sign up to deployment. The way to conceptualize this is by widening the lens, and looking at the interactions before the prospective sign ups come to the site, and perhaps even after they deploy. We look for ways to interact with our prospects through other platforms, external content, & social networks in order to create a more successful funnel inside our site. A publisher coming into our site, looking for monetization, is good for us. But a publisher coming into our site after having interacted with our content, is more likely to leave contact details, which in turn engages our admin platform, and begins the account deployment process.
So when we think about our site, we look at it as a part of our platform. And when we think of our platform, we look at it a constellation of useful channels to interact with our publishers.
This approach is making an impact on our overall sign up stats, as well as our ability to optimize the deployment process through our marketing tools. We hope to write about this soon as well.
Anyway, check out our new site and try us out.
