So here’s something I’ve never admitted before: The Come Up is broken. The homepage doesn’t work the way it should. I mean it does; everyone still checks it every day and everyone for the most part, enjoys it. But where there used to be 5 or 6 good things to post a day, now there are 20 or 30. The site moves so fast that a lot of people have a hard time keeping up with it. The site is un-inviting and overwhelming to new viewers. And the problem is only going to keep getting worse. Decent looking cameras are cheap. More and more companies are willing to pay for edits as online pre-roll CPM’s go up. And as far as I can tell, the number of badass edits coming out every day keeps going up as well. Great edits get pushed off the front page within a few hours almost as a rule.
Here are some options:
-Tightening up the site’s standards A LOT. Imagine if we limited the site to roughly 10 posts a day. And those were only the best possible things that day. Everything else gets put into another section. We’ve already taken steps towards doing this with The Oven, but The Oven doesn’t get very much traffic and if we stuck all that other stuff in there, that’d just be more videos getting less attention. We could theoretically start some other section that operates as a middle ground between TCU’s homepage and The Oven, but I think the likely effect would be the new section getting approximately as much traffic as The Oven does and The Oven’s traffic dropping to zero.
-So since that option sounds pretty shitty, we could just add more posts to the main page. Currently we show 10. I’ve discussed this with my web guys and their opinions are that it would make the site’s loadtime way too slow. The site already loads pretty slow (10 embedded videos and a bunch of Flash ads all running at once will do that) so just imagine that, but twice as bad, that’s what adding more posts to the main page would probably do.
-We could do some gigantic site re-design that was more akin to World Star or Hella Clips with a bunch of images that you click on for each post. This would be great for our page views but I am pretty sure it would be met with a user revolt. Our users like the site the way it is and any major re-design is going to alienate a huge portion of our viewers. But it’s an idea. Along these lines, I had that “expanded view” built at one point and it worked okay but I don’t think it got too much attention, especially because when it stopped working a few months ago, nobody said anything.
-Another option would be to integrate some side or top widgets that would display the most popular content of the week or month in a cool way. I’ve seen decent examples of this on other blogs. This might arguably make the site less user friendly, and it already sort of exists on a text basis with all those links to the most popular content that sit at the bottom of the site, although I doubt those links see much engagement.
So yeah. All these options have merit but none are perfect. One thing I am definitely doing in the near future is a bar at the bottom of the blog feed that links to the next 10 posts (the MMA site I check a lot has one, scroll down to the bottom) which should help people keep up to date on all the things. But as far as any major change, I am still trying to come up with a gameplan.
Previously: TCU Newsletter 5/13/12| TCU Weekly Newsletter 5/6/12| TCU Weekly Newsletter 4/29/12
