Hi guys, it's a lovely sunny day here in the UK and I have to say the future is
getting really sunny and bright for ClickASnap.com and .co.uk. I think
you probably know the guy sitting next to me is Tom Oswald, who's the CEO and
founder of ClickASnap. So we thought we'd come along and have a little chat...
So what's been going on? Because there's some big changes and exciting news
moving forward into the future. So what would you say is the biggest single
improvement you've made this year Tom? - Well one of our users (a very active user)
Mr Hans Berkland decided to post a picture up on ClickASnap and one
to 500 pics and then compared them in the forum and the quality of 500
pics versus us was staggering - they were much, much better. So we spent a good
two weeks completely redeveloping the image distribution side of the platform and
now I can safely say that actually the quality of our photos is higher than
any other photo hosting site out there. So not only do we pay-per-view we also
have a higher quality of our photos and that was, without a doubt, the single
biggest thing we've done this year.
- Are you actively advertising ClickASnap.com?
- Yes, we are. We are running display campaigns on Google Analytics
Google AdWords even! And we actually started with Bing last week, so we are
driving a significant portion of our revenue into advertising the site.
bringing more users and it's working well. We've got a cost per acquisition of
about one pound fifty to two pound per user. - How many sales a month are you
getting and what would you say was the bulk - what's making up the bulk - of sales?
- We're getting around a hundred of them, in between 80 and 120 a month. The bulk
of the sales by a large margin are downloads.
People are quite happy to pay £1 or £2 for a download. We do have prints
and usually the prints are going from between £5 and £15 and
mouse mats as well which are going for again in between £5 and £10. We very
rarely see large sales, so someone coming in buying a £200 picture and that's
indicative of the worldwide market at the moment. - Yeah absolutely, people
very rarely print things and put them on the wall and one of my things for ages
you know, get your pictures out, print them, put them
the wall. I mean I've just now made all my pictures available (many)
of my pictures available on ClickASnap to be sold as print. Any money we raise goes
towards some good work around the world, we're just finalizing something but
that's a different story. How many images are viewed as pageviews per month?
- We're having about a million page views a month.
That's a million photos viewed a month...
That's worth underlining, that's pretty good! Because ClickASnap's still a start up!
- Actually two years and one week since you last put
the video up on your YouTube channel, since you first introduced ClickASnap to the
world. So back then we had 30 or 40 images viewed per day. We now have
about 25 and 50,000 images viewed per day. We have in between one and two thousand
users per day, between three and five hundred photos uploaded per day. So yes,
it's not where I want it to be - we need another million images
uploaded per day but that'll take time to get there. - It takes time,
when you think about the giants, how long's flicker been around?
- 10 years plus - there's 10 years plus with the power and the finance of people like
Yahoo behind it. Whereas ClickASnap is basically you. - Yeah...
- You know, ok, I might be involved, but basically it's you - you're the man
who's stuck your neck out - That's why I've got no hair left!
He looked like a hippy when I first met him
Sorry were you gonna say something else? - No - Ok what's planned for the rest of the year?
- So we are actively engaging with our users and determining what they want. One
of our investors and users, a very prolific user Laura Captain, pointed out that
actually the profile pages and the way they search for images, it's not
particularly good, so we're literally right now in the middle of redesigning
the profile pages so that all of your photos and images are on one page.
We want it to look like a website as well, so we want people to go there
and for it to be personalized for that user, rather than parts of ClickASnap.
So that'll be out hopefully in the next month or so we've
brought in Amazon recognition, so we now have image recognition on all of our
images. We're refining that, we're putting that into our SEO work at
the moment, more SEO work to obviously get your images found easily...
- What is image recognition? - So, if you upload a picture of a
tree and a bush and you don't tag it, our image recognition will tag it as a tree
in a bush. Which means that actually every image that gets uploaded is now
properly tagged or at least tagged close to the relevance of the image. This is
then put into the SEO of the page which means that when Google indexes the page
and goes 'this is a page of a tree in a bush' - it knows it is a tree and a bush.
Therefore it ups our search rankings. It's basically growth hacking using
artificial intelligence to get what we want.
I really want to bring in our automated marketing system so that will basically
allow you to upload a photo and then send it to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter
and then automatically post it every hour on Twitter or whenever you want to do it.
We're waiting for an EU grant at the moment for that to happen...
That was supposed to be finalized in December... as soon as that
happens then we'll go ahead and that's our major things this year really.
- So talk to me about stock photography? Are we gonna be putting
stock photography into the platform? Yes, we've actually designed a stock
photo site, or the way it's all going to look, it's something we do plan
to put in it's not a high priority at the moment, we're gonna bring in a new method
of distributing stock photography across the internet as well - which is completely
revolutionary, will save money for the users who are using the stock photos,
prevent or mean you don't have to pay out huge amounts of money up front. You
can use very high quality photos and the photographer always gets compensated
every time their photos are used. I can't really tell you more details on that at the moment...
- That was going to be my next question?! - That is something we do
plan to bring out, it depends on our budgetary issues this year.
If everything goes as planned it'll probably towards the end of the year
possibly early next year. - What aspect, feature or interaction makes you think
Wow! I'm glad we're doing this? So in the building and growing of
ClickASnap - what's the feelgood factor in that? - I love seeing the quality of the
photos on there. There's one of our users Alan Tuning, he photographs
these tiny little mice in flowers and they
must be dandelion size... and the comments
he gets, when you see like 50 - 60 comments underneath those photos you
think actually that's two years of growth is - it's got this
network of people who are talking to each other interacting and commenting on
their photos. Then on top of that we're obviously giving them revenue it's
not huge amounts of money but actually every time someone's
seeing their photos they're starting to see the money build-up. We paid out
four and a half thousand pounds of revenue this year to users.
A major website such as ClickASnap doesn't just happen overnight -
you don't just get a bunch of coders, developers and designers
and put it all together, make it a pretty, press upload and it's live on the
web and there we go... it's all going. It's an ongoing slog of constant
innovation, fixing bugs, about improving the site, about promoting the
site about telling people it's there, otherwise it'd just be like having a
wonderful set of beautiful brochures printed, leaving them under the stairs
and wondering why no one's bought anything. But there reaches a point
of critical mass where the scales are going to tip due to its size
and the activities, things start to roll on their own. Where do you see ClickASnap
on that journey from startup to world domination for example?!
Well! We're nowhere near world domination yet unfortunately! However if you
look two years ago we did a video similar to this introducing ClickASnap
and the site crashed instantly basically - which was a great fun!
Now we deal with that sort of volume of
traffic every day with no problems at all. We made no revenue at all back then
we're now making revenue which easily covers the cost of everything that we do,
well certainly the cost of running the platform and paying the royalties and
all that sort of thing. We can scale. I would certainly put us...
I'd say we're closer to world domination than we are to startup - I mean we're still a
long way away from world domination but we're also a very long way away from
startup. As I said earlier we've been spending a hundred thousand pounds
plus a year developing this platform.
The vast majority of times we bring out these new features people embrace them,
it brings in more people to the platform. Establishing where that critical mass is?
I don't think that's possible to say, I think you're just
going to get there and you're gonna know about it when you're there. I mean at the
moment we don't have particularly many sites writing about us for example, as
soon as that starts happening it suggests that actually a lot
of people are hunting for ClickASnap because obviously people want clicks on
their web sites so therefore they will write about things that attract people.
We only have two or three hundred searches a day for ClickASnap so we're
still relatively small but there'll be a point when actually you're doing
thousand plus searches a day and people go actually know what I need to get some
of that link juice and I'll write an article about ClickASnap. I think that
would be a very good indication of getting closer to world domination when
we're at that point to be honest with you, but these things take time - we're two
years old. Facebook's 14 years old, flickers
10 years old but I would expect it to take 10 years for us to get from startup
to IPO or sale or something similar to that. - It does take time and
all you guys that use ClickASnap and support it, now this is the
key, it's gaining that critical mass and yes Tom and I
are doing whatever we can to tell people about ClickASnap and get other
people on board but it's also you guys can play an enormous role in helping.
Think back to when you're saying the site crashed when we first
launched it, there was a handful of you guys who got on board there and many of
you are still there and you're telling your friends about it and posting
pictures and sharing about it and that is what's gonna make it grow.
That is what this critical mass is all about, so please if you're interested
in ClickASnap, if you love ClickASnap, you want to see it grow. If you find any
things that we've talked about inspiring such as putting a bit of good back
into the world, of having a bloody good time with your photos and
getting a couple of quid as well then please please please
play your part because by you sharing and talking about ClickASnap and just
being active with it, you are helping achieve that critical mass and
the more you do it the sooner it will then achieve a place where it's going to work
beautifully, and it's a place where you guys will benefit too
because then the payouts per view start to go up and and there will be more revenue,
more features such as stocks, other things and the top-secret
thing that he'd kill me for if I talked about because I do know a bit about it...
But yeah I think it's doing pretty amazingly, is there anything you want to add Tom?
Thank you to our users for the feedback in the forum...
We don't know everything that's going on on that platform at any given point in time.
One of the biggest issues that we have is people not telling us about bugs,
because there are so many different variables out there, there is an almost
infinite level of different types of platforms and people using things and
ClickASnap is a massive platform it has hundreds of thousands of lines of code
it operates on multiple servers across the world, so if you have an issue -
report it in our forum and then we will do our best to deal with it and that's how we
improve. If you don't tell us about these issues then we can't improve so thank
you to those who do actively visit the forums and actually tell us what's gone
wrong for them so that we can address those issues - that's definitely what I would say.
- Yeah good point, you can't fix it if you don't know it's broken. Nice one.
Well it's good talking to you and thank you for listening guys because I think
this is getting exciting - please stay with us for the ride!