Building Whatnot’s First Ads Product — Boosted Livestreams

Steven Bourke | Ads Engineering

With growth on Whatnot increasing, we needed to give sellers more ways to connect with their community. User research told us sellers wanted more visibility with previous buyers and reach new ones while amplifying special moments. In response, we developed boosted livestreams, a feature for sellers to promote their livestream through an auction process.

For sellers who win the auction, their livestream will be placed prominently for 15 minutes in the first position within a product category feed. This prime placement provides maximum visibility to potential viewers, helping the livestream stand out.

In this post we’ll share more about boosted livestreams, the buyer and seller experiences, and the backend ad auction flows.

Introducing our initial ads product

With boosted livestreams, a seller may purchase position one within their specific category feed in 15-minute increments. This allows sellers to drive a higher-than-usual amount of traffic to their shows. This is especially useful when a seller is trying to grow their audience using tools like giveaways or auctioning one-of-a-kind or high-value products. Sellers can simply open up a screen in the app while streaming and decide to boost their show — it is that easy!

After a show is completed, a seller can see their overall success metrics in our Seller Analytics Dashboard, including key metrics like spend, impressions, and click-throughs.

Promotion in the seller’s hands

To illustrate, we’ll use an example from a fictional seller, Rayna (Seller), who let’s say recently had a Monday Madness Singles show where they created a boosted livestream.

The process looks like:

• Rayna (Seller) opens up the promote screen while performing a livestream, telling us how much they wanted to promote their show.
• We show other sellers currently bidding in their category and suggest a price range that changes dynamically based on how much other sellers are bidding.
• Once Rayna (Seller) enters their offer they will participate in an auction in our Ads services
• Rayna (Seller) will receive a notification mid-stream to be alerted that they won the auction
• When buyers such as Jessie (Buyer) navigate to the basketball cards category, they’ll see Rayna (Seller)’s show in position one. In this case, Jessie (Buyer) has never seen a show from Rayna (Seller) because the basketball cards category typically has hundreds of livestreams. Jessie (Buyer) joins because they are curious about what Rayna (Seller) is selling. Of course, Jessie (Buyer) buys some rare basketball card singles!
• After Rayna (Seller) finishes their livestream they jump into their analytics dashboard where they can see exactly how many sales and followers they received because of their boost.

Example of a seller’s Monday Madness Singles show with a boosted livestream

The Backend

To enable this simple, yet powerful experience we started building our initial Ads system, capable of running real-time auctions, performing billing, and generating event-based performance data for internal and external reporting tools.

We describe the previous flow in a little more detail using the system flow.

1. When Jessie (Buyer) navigates to the basketball category tab the client requests a boosted livestream from the Whatnot Ads backend.
2. The Whatnot ads backend then goes to retrieve a boosted livestream. In doing so a boosted livestream auction is initiated because there is currently no active livestream boost. The auction takes into account boost bid price and a simple quality heuristic to determine the winner of the auction.
3. When a seller wins the boosted livestream auction, we charge against our internal billing service.
4. The winning boosted livestream is returned from the auction process to our ads backend(4a); At the same time, our analytics and billing system then generates a variety of backend events which are sent to our event bus to be consumed later(4b). Because our events are used predominantly for reporting purposes there is no strict SLA for when they are consumed.
5. The ads service then returns the boosted livestream to the client to be placed into position one in Jessie (Buyer)’s feed. Because the insertion is done via our pre-existing feed infrastructure we ensure this process works within the pre-existing SLAs. Additionally, we perform a deduplication phase to ensure the livestream does not appear twice.
6. If the boosted livestream is viewable for 200ms in the viewport we generate front-end events to say Jessie (Buyer) saw Rayna (Seller)s boosted livestream, these events are also published to our event bus. These events are generated on the client and sent via segment.io. We push segment events to a hosted Kafka instance.
7. We take the event data from our data lake and publish it to our internal data warehouse where we also perform a variety of ETL jobs to transform the data for our external facing systems.
8. We take our generated metrics and write them to our online analytics data store in a consumer way for each seller so that they can slice and dice their metrics.
9. The data is then made available in the seller dashboard for Rayna (Seller) to see how their boosted livestream performed.

But does it work?

Of course! While still very early, Sellers have told us the flexibility of boost allows them to use the tool as a lever for increasing viewership at any point during their livestream. This especially comes in handy when sellers have special items they want to auction or simply want to bring in fresh viewers into their stream.

We’ve seen strong ROI (~30%) when Sellers use Boost, and spend by sellers has grown ~20% monthly. This is a fairly exciting direction for a 0 to 1 product and we are working hard to add additional Ads levers for Sellers to grow their business on Whatnot!

Next Steps

Boosted livestream has helped sellers build stronger and deeper connections with their buyer community by improving their discoverability. We will be expanding to include impression-based ad products whereby every request from the client will enter an auction process. We’re also building out a more complete ad stack including foundational components, and ad quality services, which will leverage the latest artificial intelligence techniques and system architectures to serve real-time relevant ads to our buyers.

We’re just getting started building out seller tooling and operations as we continue to grow our marketplace. If you’re interested in building the future of ads at Whatnot, join us!

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Adam Niepokój, Alan Ren, Karthik Subramaniam, Mikolaj Leszczynski, Simon Zelazny, Soo Jin Yoon, and all the partners across Whatnot that helped launch the 0 to 1 Ads product.