COUB service founder Mikhail Tabunov about website personalization, virality and special projects

The looped video service COUB is one of the first sites that began using our technologies to personalize the site. The founder of the service, Mikhail Tabunov, told how the COUB is arranged and why it is not necessary to make its recommendation system when there is Relap.io .

What they talked about:

• How COUB stopped making its recommendation system and why he does not advise doing it to others.
• How to make special projects for 1 million coverage on the site where users generate content.
• People share what they create. How the users took over the promotion of COUB.
• Why new planning services cannot beat Excel.
• Where to look for ideas and who to read.

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Relap.io is now forming the whole block of recommendations under the cubes. Why didn't you make your recommendation system?

In fact, we made it, and even had several versions. When they decided to compare the conversion with Relap , it turned out that Relap gives twice as many referrals. We tried several algorithms: we put similar on tags kouba, the “hottest” content and content that is similar in content. As a result, our algorithm had a maximum of 25% conversion, while Relap reached 50%.

In general, a good advisory algorithm is quite difficult to do. It is not clear what are the best practices. If you develop yourself, you have to fill all the bumps from scratch. Not every project will have resources for this.

Here are the recommendations of Relap on our site:

How does a coub earn?

We, like other media projects, make money from advertising. There are several main advertising formats, starting with special projects on the site and ending with media advertising in the player.

Which ad format makes more money?

It is difficult to say, because there is a lot of seasonality. At the end of the year special projects are leading, otherwise media advertising.

Special projects how are you doing? After all, the content on the site is created by the users themselves?

Special projects are almost always tied to our virality and user-generated content. The most popular mechanic is when our users make koubas from a brand's video. From advertising, movie trailers, whatever. The user enters the video editor, sees the branding, which briefly describes what needs to be done, participates and wins the prize. Such a project in a week can collect more than a million views of Koubas.



If the brand has no video, then we think of something else. For example, for Samsung Galaxy A we did a project where the main task was to tell that Samsung released the first phone in a metal case. Users made koubas on metal. Metal, as music, as material, without a difference.

In general, a special project is, first of all, about the involvement of our creative audience. Therefore, projects can be announced in a bunch of different ways, from branding the editor to overlay in the embed and mailing lists. Announcement coverage can reach several million users per day.

People who make koubas all the time are the core of the audience. How do you label and measure it?

By the number of people who have made at least one cock over the past month. This is about 40−50 thousand people. And the entire audience Coub - 50−55 million

And by age, who comes to you the most?

Our largest group is between 25 and 34 years old. They are 18-24 years old. Mostly men.

How do you attract a new audience and promote the service?

The whole project works on virality. Users make viral content that is becoming massive and thus brings even more users. Therefore, now our main promotion forces are focused on the development of the community that this content makes. We make the process of creating cubes easier and give more tools for video editing. Users love it and create more and more.

Have you developed any mechanics or interface solutions that push the user to create his own?

Creating content for the user is a very big effort. We are trying to simplify it with all our strength, so that people feel comfortable trying. In general, we have two main barriers to creating content:

• What to do koub.
• How to edit it so that it is cool.

We simplified the search for videos to the maximum. If you do not want to search for anything, then you can just take someone else's kob, change it a little bit and make your own. The perfect memory generator. With video editing, everything is more complicated, because, anyway, in this you need to spend time to figure it out. Here, again, various editor improvements can help the user figure out how it all works.

In general, to convert a user who only consumes content into a creator is a very troublesome and dreary business. If a person lights up and joins the community - he will convert, if not - he will make one or two koubas and leave.

Where do most audiences come from?

Of course, from social networks. Mainly from VKontakte and some from Facebook. Many more come from attractive blogs such as Pikabu, Yaplakal and Fiski.net.

What is your favorite koub?

Kouba is not, but there is a favorite section. Random. It gets the best of the best, in random order. You can stick with guaranteed, here is the link .

Do you make koubas yourself?

I manage development and check all features that go into release. Therefore, I have a bunch of debug content. This has become a kind of meme on the site. For example, the last debug box got 28 likes.

Out of funny, I made a cool cock on the first of January. He got up in the morning, drank vodka, ate a caviar sandwich and gave birth to this monster .

Do you somehow purposefully distribute koubas on social networks?

We only maintain official pages on Vkontakte, Facebook and Twitter. The rest of the distribution occurs automatically, due to virality.

It often happens that the people who make koubas publish them themselves. Someone leads the community in "VKontakte", someone writes articles. There is a person who at the "Silver Rain" works as an SMM-manager and fucks kouba. Superwired videos diverge very quickly - there can be 4 million views in two days.

You do not push them, do not pour money?

Not. The group grows organically. Already a million passed.

Do you have a person who is engaged in social networks?

Yes, there is, but he is not only engaged in social networks. We have an editorial office that is responsible for the content as a whole: they find good koubas and put them in the right places on the site so that our users have something to see.

How many people is the editorial staff?

Two full-time employees and two or three freelancers who help them.

What services do you use for communication and tasks?

For travel we use Jira and Trello. Everything related to development - in Jira, the rest in Trello. As for communication, then about a year ago we were powerfully hooked on Slack. I first stubborn, but still happy. It allows you to build effective communication in a team, and this greatly saves everyone time. Mail flow has decreased three times.

I also want to say something to everyone who is eyeing or just switched to Slack. It is simply created to integrate with all other services. Take Jira, for example. It is much easier to write a message with a message and send it than to open Jira, look for the Create Issue button and figure out where to write. I wrote a special bot with which you can write down a task from any discussion in Slack.

It turned out to be so convenient to manage something through the messenger that through the same bot I automated the release process. There is a special channel #ops, you write there: bot deploy prod - and a new release is automatically rolled out. All events from monitoring are written there. Immediately in sight, if something broke. Plus, the whole story is also stored there.

What services are watching, from whom do you adopt experience and ideas?

I subscribe to a lot of blogs in Feedly (RSS-reader) and try to read everything regularly on Thursdays. It takes two to three hours, but I am aware of all the important things. I bring good thoughts to a tablet called Ideas.

I also try to read a book a week, there is a treasure there.

Why for ideas a sign, and not some Trello?

In Trello, it's inconvenient to work when you have 300 tasks in your column. And I have about 500 in one list. And I regularly do something with it: I update, I add, and so on.

Who are you reading in RSS?

I have four folders:

• Startup news. From America, Asia, Australia and Europe. There are 10-20 blogs in total. Usually, if there is a cool project with breakthrough ideas, then they will definitely write about it somewhere.
• Venture funds blogs. It is very interesting to read analytical reports, for example about KPCB. Funds usually have a lot of expertise and resources to do good research.
• About technology. I have Hacker News, MIT Technology Review and a few more.
• About business in general. There is generally a cesspool of blogs of all sorts of business consultants and sites like psfk.com (which publish one idea per day). They write about funny ideas of all kinds. Type of quadcopter for selfie.

Feedly generally has its own feed directory, and usually they put only the verified ones there. I recommend everyone to watch.

What do you advise from the books about management?

Some megakruty management books do not exist, I think. They are all very boring and boring.

According to management theory, I advise Peter Drucker to everyone. This is an American business consultant, one of the first who began to approach management scientifically. There he writes about who such a manager is, what he should do every day and how he should make decisions. In general, it is worth reading, but it is very boring.

On production management, I highly recommend two books:

• " Lean production ". Very cool book about several large plants. Their problems, the organization of processes and the whole industrial culture.
• " Goal ". In a very beautiful form outlines the main ideas of lean manufacturing.

Read very interesting. At least because they are based on real enterprises, with real problems and people.