2007 Q4 AboutUs Stakeholder Meeting
11 December 2007 4:30pm (PDT/GMT-8)
Please join us at our U.S. offices:
- 107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
- Portland, OR 97214
Some notes on our new location:
- The best way to reach us is to enter the building through the Stark Street entrance.
- Go up a few stairs to the elevator and then ride it up to the 5th floor.
- Once you reach the 5th floor, take a left out of the elevator and follow the hall until you see us on the right.
- We are the only tenants on the 5th floor.
- call 1-800-AboutUs if you get lost.
Other options for participating include:
- Join the Conference Call: The call is for listening only. To ask questions or make comments, please do so via IRC.
- dial in: +1 712.580.7700
- wait for message, then hit "2" to enter an access code
- access code: "22688 87#" (AboutUs)
- provided by: FreeConference.com
AND
There are two ways to access the IRC channel:
- via the webpage http://www.miccas.net/aboutus_irc/ or
- downloading an IRC client and joining server: irc.freenode.net & channel #AboutUs
Your participation is very much appreciated.
Stakeholder Update
- AboutUs Stakeholder Report
- December 5, 2007
Executive Summary
The past three months have allowed AboutUs to focus on expanding our operations, make needed improvements to the site and nurture its growing community. We are pleased to share the summary below. As always, there is a much higher level of detail on the site itself.
Traffic Overview
Traffic Growth continues to be strong, despite some leveling in August and November. Driving new visitors to the site remains a fundamental focus. Additionally, demonstrating user engagement is rising in importance.
| Month | Unique Visitors |
|---|---|
| January 2007 | 1,118,059 |
| February 2007 | 1,304,283 |
| March 2007 | 1,619,040 |
| April 2007 | 2,192,951 |
| May 2007 | 2,657,512 |
| June 2007 | 3,185,579 |
| July 2007 | 4,142,939 |
| August 2007 | 4,237,580 |
| September 2007 | 4,558,655 |
| October 2007 | 5,132,257 |
| November 2007 | 5,250,177 |
Venture Northwest
- AboutUs was fortunate to be selected to participate in the Oregon Entrepreneurial Network’s annual Venture Northwest conference that brought together 14 emerging companies and about 30 venture capital companies for a day of presentations and networking opportunities. AboutUs created a successful showpiece page that served as a great resource for the event as well as a great introduction to AboutUs’ offerings.
Developments
- Google AdSense for Content and Search has been turned on and is showing good results. We are achieving over $3 cpm for AdSense for Content and over $20 cpm for AdSense for Search.
- Whois Refresh is our first jointly completed, line of business, development effort that cooperatively featured both the Lahore and Portland offices. This effort updates every domain page (that hasn’t been manually updated) with current Whois data.
- The AboutUs.org main page has been redesigned to impart a professional and informative look and feel.
- After a trip to the Lahore office in November, Lahore office staff is up to 23.
- Dev has implemented portal content drill down capabilities that will enable us to track the success of portals created by both staff and community members.
- The Community staff has launched a new community portal designed to give a snapshot of community activity including new member edits, news, edit reviewing and new people welcoming.
- On 13 November, AboutUs.org passed the 10 million page mark.
Stakeholder Meeting
- We have many more details to share and, as always, would appreciate input from all of our stakeholders.
- This quarter’s update will include the “pitch” that will be used as we continue to pursue Series A funding. We look forward to your input.
Next year’s stakeholder meetings:
- Tuesday, April 15, 2008
- Tuesday, July 15, 2008
- Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
- Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Agenda
- Overview of the past quarter
- The "Pitch"
- Feedback
- Overview of goals for the next quarter
- Questions and Answers
Meeting Notes
Meeting notes provided for you by Julia. Please feel free to refactor, improve or correct as you see fit!
Calling the meeting to order.
Three folks on the Conference call & several folks on IRC, Staff & about 8 visitors.
Ray goes over the mechanics of the meeting.
Welcome.
To begin with: Traffic. Google is indexing the information on our site differently. They change the way they index on the first of each month. There are always winners & losers in this. This month we will lose for the first time.
Let's get all of the bad news out of the way.
Our revenue comes primarily from Google AdSense.
Ray gives an overview of how the ads work. We have content ads & search ads which provide revenue at different cpm.
In November we got a notice from Google re: our implementation of AdSense for Search. So we scaled it way to be in compliance. Secondly, Google also changed the way they count "clicks" on ads. Before if you clicked on the white space around the ads & go to the ad, we were credited. Now, you must click on the WORDS, not the white space. This will create a temporary (according to Google) lull in revenue.
Ward had a good conversation with an AdSense rep from Google. From Ward: Google scan sites with their ads on it. We responded conservatively to be in compliance, but the rep indicated that we had over reacted. So, we have decided this week to go back to the more aggressive search, include our Rep in the conversation, and move forward with open communication with our Google rep. We think this should help.
Ray: Content sites are good for AdSense revenue. We are in a unique hybrid Content/Algorithmic content.
We realize that the site started quickly with algorithmic data. We believe this is a gift from Google. It is our job to take this enormous amount of traffic & convert it to engaged users. This is what we can control.
So, we are working on engagement. We have added AddThis to our site for social bookmarking. We have over 2,000 bookmarks to our site each week.
The Funnel of Engagement: Updated. We have spent a fair amount of time working on who we serve. We have decided on a customer: An internet savvy business person who is seeking visibility and credibility. We are now creating products & services specifically this person. We realize that we cannot be all things to all people.
Our first call to action is the EDIT button.
Ray talks specifically about the funnel of engagement graphic... hard to keep up!
We are about to begin a program where we ask for email addresses upon anonymous edit "save". We can offer them alerts & other features they might want in exchange for their email address.
We are also going to initiate a program of being "surrogate" collaborators until they get up & running on the site.
Additionally, we will offer these services on ever page. We have 200,000 visitors a day, we believe there will be takers.
Question: how do you prevent abuse? Brandon responds in detail with our protections regarding safe guarding email addresses. We are being conservative.
Ray talks for a minute about the "critics" who visit our site.
Page Sponsorship
Engagement: we would like to get an email address in exchange for useful services.
Question re: edits per day. Ray clarifies that we patrol over 3,000 edits a day. Ward clarifies that most edits are minor edits to correct info.
Badges: Once the observer becomes a participant we try to demonstrate the wiki values. We want business owners to buy in & state that they believe in the values & invite folks to collaborate on the AboutUs page for their site.
Ray explains that we are a neutral site & as long as you are constructive, you are welcome to edit.
Ray gives a demonstration about google results and control over the site. For most folks, their site comes up first & they fully control it. In general, everything other than that are things others have said about the site over which the business has NO control. The AboutUs page is the collaboration page over which the business owner has partial control.
Keith talks about a phone call he took in which he reassured a new user. Ray follows up in saying that we have a large educational burden. Brandon chimes in to say that we want the badge to serve as something like an "energy star" logo. This is a positive logo. We would like the consumer who sees our badge on a site to feel the same way. That t"his is a positive site with which I want to do business."
Ray: in the process of figuring out who our customer is, we also spent some time figuring out what we are offering these folks: We offer friendly wiki experts to help navigate this new way of doing business. Our product offering: a wiki wiz to help you... a personal experience.
We want to turn what we are already doing this for free so we'd like to make a business out of it.
Ward chimes in that this is what our customers already love about us. They don't expect us to be there for them. This is how we'd like to move forward on individual page revenue.
Portals: we've worked on portal tools and we've built an example in PortandTech. Tak & Chris give an overview of PortlandTech: this is where collaboration can lead. This resource connects companies & profile pages with a map & calendar. We are going to facilitate this collaboration. This is a new, deep & rich resource. There are also specific recent changes to this portal. So, you can be updated to this whole arena. This will help create community. This will be a record of changes & events in PortlandTech.
Chris brings up the "one minute pitch" feature we are implementing. (Check the SnapNames.com page for a one minute pitch from Ray. In order to incentivize, we will go to your Portland office & record, edit & post your one minute pitch.
We hope that PortlandTech is the model for future cities. Chris invites folks to come & browse, make an edit & collaborate. Tak points out that the badge is trackable by google analytics which will show the stats.
Ray: Use case we're hoping for is that someone might stumble on a page... you make an anonymous edit, we ask if you'd like to see changes to this page. If yes, would you like to see changes to the whole portal. If yes, this will not be spam because it is for changes that matter to you. That will make you want to engage & create a login so that you can be identified by your community. We believe this is viral.
We have spent a lot of time building content. In some cases, it goes into a a black hole in the site. So we have built in the badges so that even if it feels like content is in a black hole, we may find that those pages get a lot of click throughs. We also believe that portals provide good sponsorship opportunities.
Our test case was ICANNWiki. So we know it works. We believe that PortlandTech could be attractive as advertising for law firms, bankers, any number of folks who serve the tech community.
Question: how much will you charge for this? Ray: we will adjust the pricing based on scope of project. Several thousand $ a month. Chris points out that it will eventually be a bid system.
Accomplishments for past quarter:
- WhoIs refresh, this has been a difficult process but we have the technology in place. This helps with our algorithmic data. This will help. It has not been easy. The scale of the project has made it difficult. The whole project will take several months. This is the first major set of code that has come out of Lahore. Our Lahore office has many folks who don't have the benefit of the wiki experience represented in this office. It has been a challenge to get them up & running.
- The definition of our customer has been another development. Ward chimes in to explain the process of investigating who actually comes to the site & edits. That informed the process. We couldn't have arrived at our core customer any earlier because we needed the experience.
- Portal technology
For next quarter look forward to:
- Execution
- Engagement
- Revenue.
Ray talks about getting better at executing on our work and explains that we will be implementing a more traditional management style until we get better at executing on our work. We have the people, the facilities & the plan. Now we must show that we can execute.
End of presentation. Focuses on the team.
Questions:
- Revenue? Ray: page level revenue, portal sponsorship. These two ways are where we will focus. Ray believes the page level revenue has more potential due to how many page views we get.
- will you be adding to the team? No is the short answer. Until we can prove we can sell the sponsorships
- Communication with Lahore: Operationally: we have been there 3 times. Fantastic visits. Between those visits the Lahore team is much less efficient because training & communication has been difficult. It is tiring due to the time change. They request more visits to improve their efficiency. Now our new mindset, is that each morning Portland is deciding what we will do for the day. At the end of the day, we determine what we'd like to see from Lahore. We work with them through skype and IRC. When they finish their day, they report. We would like to pass the baton back & forth.
- Is this what you expected? We very much did not want an exploitive, out sourcing model because it's narrower & less creative. That's why we started a company there rather than working though agents. So they participate in decisions. The reality check is that we have had more than a year head start on them. Most of our employees were wiki enthusiasts before working on AboutUs. For Lahore, it's all new. Folks just out of college with no wiki experience. From Ward, we are putting this much effort into this because we expect them to be leaders there. We are inching it up.
- Is the political situation affecting the work? Ray tells a story about being in Lahore. It was inconvenient but not impactful. Brandon asks Mark to chime in. Mark says this sums it up.
- Do you have stakeholder meetings ever quarter? Yes. We have three new investors... Ray welcomes the new folks. All great additions.
Thank you very much. Ray ends the presentation.
