231: A Better Experience - Building Engagement, Not Just Traffic with Kingston Duffie

Foreign.

Hey, friend. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for making the show a part of your day today. Alexa here and I wanted to welcome you to the 231st episode of the podcast. And the focus for Today's episode, this 231st episode of ours, is engagement. Now, if you've been around the food blogging industry for the past few years, you've probably heard the word engagement over any other metric. And that's because brands, bloggers, and creators are putting a greater emphasis on engagement, even over other KPIs or metrics like page views or followers. And that's why Kingston is here today. His company, Slickstream, is aimed at increasing engagement on blogger sites. And if you visited our sister site Pinch of Yam lately, chances are you've seen Slickstream in action. And heck, you might have even used Slickstream without even knowing. This is a really interesting interview focusing on ways that you can increase engagement on your own site, and we think you're really going to like it. So without any further ado, Bjork. Take it away.

Kingston. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, glad to be here.

Yeah, super excited to talk to you about multiple different things, but the core of what I'm excited about is just to flip seats a little bit because for a long time we have been partnering together and I have been talking about what it's like to be a publisher as you are building Slickstream. And anybody who's been on Pinch of Yum, once we start talking about it, you're going to be familiar with Slickstream. We're going to talk about why that's been an important tool for us. But before we do that, for the first time ever, I've never been able to do this because we've always been talking about data and how we can improve engagement. But for the first time ever, I would love to spend a little bit of this podcast to actually interview you just about your story. So are you. Would that be okay? Are you okay if we jump into that?

Absolutely.

Okay, so this. This would be one of those things where I'm gonna jump into right away something that might be embarrassing, but embarrassing because it is such a high compliment. So way back when, when we were first connected, I was like, okay, you know, there's a decent amount of emails that we get where people are looking for insights or help or advice or they want to talk to publishers. So I said, let me do a little bit of research who this Kingston is. And so I Google, and one of the first page articles on Google was A New York Times article where it's like, okay, there's some credibility here mentioned in New York Times article. Let's see what it says. And I'll read the first paragraph. This might be the embarrassing part, but it's a. It's an immediate props out to you. And the first paragraph says this. There's a time when children were told they could hope to be president. But for many Americans, the envied footsteps are no longer those of Al Gore or George W. Bush. Now people dream of being like Pete Kingston, Duffy, Richard Tinsley, or Denise Savoy. So take me back to the year 2000. You were building a startup and obviously had enough success to be featured in the New York Times. And for this author to say, no longer the envy of parents would be Al Gore, George W. Bush. But Kingston, what was going on at that time and what was your story at that time?

Yeah, that was a super exciting time for us. That was my second startup that I created, a company called Turnstone. And in 2000, we had just taken that company public. You know, we did what is called an ipo, raised money on the stock markets. And that was when that New York Times article came out, was when all the valuations were going through the roof. The company's worth a lot of money. And suddenly I, who had been an obscure person, suddenly was in the limelight, at least for a little while. That startup came out of nowhere. We just started it in 1997, and two years later, we were filing to go public. And it was a really wild roller coaster ride.

Yeah. And I would imagine. And I would imagine this article being that it's February 2000, so just a couple months after it turned to a couple months after or a month after Y2K. And then we realized that actually this isn't a big deal, but it's right at the. I would imagine there is the peak, and then soon there'd be this. This point where the roller coaster potentially is going down a little bit. What was that like to ride that roller coaster during the time. During that time as it relates to a startup, and especially a startup that has an IPO that goes on the public market.

Yeah, it was amazing because this was my second company in Silicon Valley. It was also funded by venture capital. And we had a board of directors with some VCs on it. And they were complaining. This is funny now to remember it. They were complaining at every board meeting, you guys are not spending enough money. As the management team of a company, you're thinking, no, no, you're supposed to be complaining we're spending too much money.

Right, right.

No, they were saying, you are not spending enough money because we got to grow even faster. This market is really on fire. And Rick, you mentioned Richard Tinsley. Rick Tinsley was the CEO. I was the CTO of the company, and we were partners in it. And we were saying, gee, we don't know how fast this market can grow. So we were reluctant to really grow so fast. We were doing. We went from zero in 1997 to $100 million in revenue in less than two years.

Wow.

And the board of directors was saying, this market is crazy. Let's spend way more money and grow even faster. But all of a sudden, in 2000, most of your listeners probably aren't old enough to remember this, but the market we were in just took a big tank. All of a sudden, all of these new DSL providers all went out of business, and they were our customers. And this was like phone companies going out of business. It was amazing. But we were sitting there literally with $300 million of cash in a bank account because we have been very profitable. And all of our customers basically disappeared overnight.

Wow.

So that's where, you know, that's where the hard part of running a company really comes in, where things go south. And so we have a lot of work to do to figure out, is our market going to continue to exist? What should we do? And in fact, we spent about a year really understanding that the markets were changing. And in fact, we took that money that we had in the bank and just redistributed it to our investors and said, you know, I think this is over.

Yeah.

And we're delighted that we did that rather than go spray it away trying to be into some other market.

Yeah. You know, it's really interesting to think back to that time. So that was. I was a freshman in high school, and I was just getting into investing in stocks. And my dad was an art teacher at the high school. And I remember every day when school would wrap up, I would go over to his classroom, and I think at the time he had one of those the school had purchased, at least for the art department, those colorful Macs, desktop Macs. And so I'd log on and I would check my stocks on some online stock portfolio thing as the nerdy freshman that I was. But I remember just seeing the ups and downs and being so impacted by that. But I can't imagine, as the founder or co founder of a company that times in some ways, 100 million. Right. So, like, it's you feel that in a way that on an amplified scale. But one of the things that was interesting to me with your story is that when we first jumped on a call and I'm kind of having these conversations with you and one of your partners in six Dream was there or somebody on the team, Carl. And I remember we were kind of chatting a little bit and I said, so. And this is before I had really researched or done my due diligence. I said, so have you ever started a company before? And you didn't. You just were like, politely like, yeah, there's, you know, I have some experience with startups and I have a couple other. And Carl kind of chuckled in the background, I think knowing the true story of how many times you've been through this. But one of the questions that I have is for you as it relates to startups is why, like what, what is it that keeps you coming back to this? And what is the, the, the engine that keeps you going? Because I think it's helpful for entrepreneurs, of which everybody who listens to this podcast is in some way to hear other people reflect on their why. I think the why is really core to doing what we do. And so often we think that it's money, but oftentimes it's not. The why is different than that. So I'm curious to know what is your why? Why do you keep doing this?

Well, that's a great question. You know, bluntly, I've. In companies I've done up till now, I've made all the money I'll ever spend. Money is not a very big motivator after you get over a certain level. But there are a lot of other motivators. And I'll tell you, it comes for me about there's really two things. One is in a small company, when you're, as a startup, you tend to be working with a handful of really good people, because why would you be working with the people who aren't good? And so you're in an environment that you can move quickly like a speedboat, and you're surrounded by a team of people that you really trust and you like. And boy, that's a fun environment to be in. And so coming into work every day, you don't have all that big company bureaucracy and everything else. So that's a big factor. But I think the even bigger factor is there's nothing that motivates someone more, in my opinion, than seeing someone that you're helping happy with what you created for them. That's such A rewarding feeling. And I think that's true in almost every entrepreneurial field you can think of, which is the real turn on is to see a customer say, oh, I just love that thing you created. That's what gets me up in the morning.

Yeah. And it's an art, it's a version of design. It is creating things in the world that people respond to and that people appreciate and that people get value out of. And what I hear you saying is that that is your why at this point is to create things that make, in a small way or big way, make people's lives better. And for Slickstream, that is. It's kind of twofold. It is both the user. So somebody who comes to a website, we're going to talk more about Slickstream in a little bit. It's people who come to a website have a better experience, but it's also the publisher and it's the person who is creating a site and then is using a service like Slickstream to make that a little bit better. So before we get there to talking about Slickstream, a few more questions just about your journey. One of the questions that I have is, or one of the things that I've observed as I've worked with you that's been really inspiring is kind of this relentless pursuit of understanding the people that you are working with and the customers that you have. I think that's one of the things that people are timid about or they're cautious about. But I've noticed with Slickstream, really, you and the team are really intentional to engage the customer, to ask questions for people who are publishing content or potentially creating a product, what advice would you give for them that you've learned through the years? As you've built startups, as you've built a customer base, as you've created very profitable, very successful businesses, that you've learned as it relates to engaging the customer in life, learning from them, and then how you fold that into your final product.

Yeah. What I think we've learned over the years is when everything looks like it's on fire and growing like crazy, you can get easily sort of caught up in this idea of, oh, can I make it grow faster? Can I have more? Can I scale it? In Silicon Valley, you hear this word scale all the time, and I scale it faster. And when you've got something that people want, you can get this sort of viral moment when things are growing really fast. In fact, we're kind of in that moment right now. A Slickstream, things coming up fast. What we have to keep reminding ourselves is it's great when it's all growing magically, but what is your most important asset? It's going to be loyal customers, because inevitably something's going to go wrong. Inevitably, the market's going to go a little soft. Inevitably something's going to go wrong. And when it does, boy, the foundation on which your whole building is built is going to be those customers who say, you know, but I really like those guys. They've really tried to do the right thing for me. And even if, oh, man, they made a mistake and took down my whole site, but I know they're really trying to do right by me. That is what's going to save you when you're on the downturn. But even in the upswing, what makes people passionate about telling their friends about something? Well, it's because they loved it. It wasn't just that it was okay or, yeah, I got a 4% increase in something. It's they loved it. So what I've learned is the only way you find out if they really love something is to talk to people. And when you do, if you're listening, they're going to tell you the next thing you need to do. So you've got to have some good ideas of what to put on the table. But it's the good customers who are loyal that are going to tell you exactly what they need. And you, Bjork, are a great example of that. You've been super helpful to us as we've tried to figure out which are the parts of the product that we should go forward with, which are the parts we could. That was interesting, but let's let that go. So that's been really important for us.

Yeah. Well, thanks, I appreciate that. And important to point out, while I'm thinking of it, I kind of loosely mentioned this before, but honored to be an advisor for Slickstream. So just people know that we are invested in the success of the company, but also we use Slickstream on Pinch of Yum, which is this really great combination for us in both using the product and then also being able to be involved behind the scenes and kind of weighing in on or talking through some of the potential ways that it could be improved or tweaked or enhanced. And one of the things that we've seen on our side or that I've seen is that exact example or that exact picture that you painted where.

For.

Somebody who has been through rounds of success with startups, I think in our minds a lot of times what we can imagine is have you watched the show Silicon Valley? It's the HBO show, you know, I.

Watched the first two episodes.

It's too close to the truth. Yes, totally, totally. It's one of my favorite shows and I think I'm far enough away from true Silicon Valley, both in distance, living in Minnesota, but also we're kind of bootstrapped, slower growth companies that I can watch it and kind of be fascinated and still kind of relate to it. But there's this character on there and I forget his name, but he always talks about that he's part of the 3 comma club and he's like this and he has all these phrases for it and he's the most obnoxious, terrible character that you just love to hate. And I think in the minds of a lot of people there's this idea of success looking like that. But what's interesting to me is that on the opposite side, and I would say it's the complete opposite side, has been my interactions. And I know other people that have worked with you as it relates to Slickstream, where it feels like you and the Slickstream team like, hey, we are serving you, we are working hard to figure this out. And I think that's a really humble position to take, especially when you've had previous success, but also just in general to have this idea of serving customers and to be so outwardly intentional with that. And I'm curious to know if that's just who you are and then you also hire that way. Or do you have internal kind of tools in your tool belt that exist that you could share with the audience. To say these are the concepts that I have or the beliefs that we have of which you've already shared a little bit, but something to help other people understand how they can serve their customers and their audience. Because you've been through it, you've done a good job with it, we've seen that showcased. But I'm guessing that you have these mindsets or these frameworks potentially that exist even if they're kind of loosely existing in your head in terms of how you implement that within the business.

Yeah. So that's a big question. But let me just a few things come off the top of my head. First is there are many paths to success just in Silicon Valley. Look at a couple of examples. You've got Steve Jobs, who was the founder of Apple, who he was renowned to be a really, really difficult guy to work for because he was so passionate about how things needed to work. And he would extremely demanding of the people around him. But what was that demand about is he was super passionate that the customer had to be absolutely delighted, you know, that he would bend over backwards so that when he gave one of those presentations of the new feature, people would gasp with how wonderful it was. But, boy, he was just terrible to work for because he just had no time for anyone who didn't do what he said or make it work the way he wanted it. That's a pathway to success. That real sort of determined, I know what's right, and I'm going to be the guy standing in front of it. When we present, there is another paradigm, and this is sort of the Bill Gates paradigm, who very much behind the scenes, easy to work with. The people around him all like him, but he is just steadily nudging the organization, always a little bit in the right direction. And that was another big path to success. So if you take someone like Larry Ellison, who's the founder of Oracle, he's a guy who is absolutely ruthless in business, that he will do anything to close a deal, this is not. This is public knowledge. He is well known for, if you're going to win, do anything to win. And these are three different models of very different behaviors that are all very successful in Silicon Valley. My own belief is I come from it with this idea that the people around me that I'm working with and the people around me that are my customers know in many cases a lot more than I do. So I come at it from this standpoint of I'm an ideas guy. I'm always throwing out you. You can speak to this Burke. And I'm always coming with five new ideas for what we could do.

Yep.

But I then stop and listen and trying to hear, you know, that might have seemed like a good idea. But Carl, for example, one of my partners, very sharp guy who sees the world in a different way, will come back and say, well, that sounds interesting, but, you know, I don't think it's gonna work. So I think listening for me is a difficult skill, but it's a really important one. And I think that's been my path to success so far, is working with talented people around me.

Yeah, that's great. It's a concept.

I don't think there's any one right answer to this idea of what gets you to success.

That's great. And I think that it's a concept that we occasionally try and revisit here, is that sometimes what we can do is we can see somebody else walking on a path and you reference the path to success and think like, oh, I need to use that path to get to the same place. And a lot of times that path isn't going to be a good fit for us. Or another analogy or example is I watched a video, this was a few weeks ago, about those goats that scale the mountains at, like, these extreme angles. And it works for them, but it probably wouldn't work for our lazy dog, Sage, but they could both probably find their own path to success. And I think the same is true, like you said, for entrepreneurs, for people building things where you don't have to replicate what somebody else does, you have to understand who you are, and then how do you operate within the most successful version of yourself in order to move things forward? So I think a great little point.

Exactly right, yeah.

And related to that, I think one of the things that you need to be willing to do is to change and adjust and kind of pivot along the way. I know with Slickstream, that was true. Where when we first started having conversations, it was really early stage and even maybe a little bit unclear about the exact direction that Slickstream would go as an engagement tool. So was there a different version of Slickstream and how did that come about? And then also within that, this is a double question, which is terrible for a podcast interview to do, but can you talk about the need to pivot and change as an entrepreneur to evolve your idea and how that happened within Slickstream?

Yeah, well, even I'll go back even a step. Before I started talking to you, we had been. So I formed a team of some of the best guys I had worked with in the past and said, let's go ahead and start something new. And I don't even know what exactly it's going to be, but it's going to be something about collaboration and let's go try this. And so that's how this group came together. And we decided, you know, let's not rush things, let's go try to do a few different things and we'll find where is. In Silicon Valley, we often talk about this idea of fast moving water, meaning think about putting your canoe in the river, but you're stuck in an eddy on the side. What you're really trying to do is find the place where the. Where the water is moving fast. And sometimes it's hard to see it until your canoe actually gets into the water. So we're trying some things, and I want to tell you about just one example, which is we had it in mind that there needs to be Kind of the next generation of Internet web publishing. And we see a lot of content is sort of sitting in an old fashioned model and we want to kind of nudge that forward. So we invented this new thing that we called Braid. And it was an interactive online magazine where the idea of each new story that we write, think of a story in a magazine. Each new story that we're going to write is going to be like an app where the people who come to read the story, it's not just reading text or images on a screen, it's really interacting with it like an app. And the way that I would learn about what this was is interacting with it. So for example, one of the stories we did in this was to tell the story of North Korea and nuclear weapons development. And we did that by letting you explore what were all the nuclear weapons that had existed. You know, it was a very newsy kind of article at the time North Korea was running its nuclear program. But we tried a lot of different these articles and we would get more or less success. Very much like a new post on a blog might get a little viral or not. But along came one of these articles we did, which was just meant to be kind of fun, where we came across the data for every drive in theater that had ever existed in the United States. We managed to find the data for where were they all? And we created this interactive explorer where you could just go look for drive in theaters and on a map, an interactive map where you could drill down and actually see. Oh. And in fact, what we did was we said if you see a drive in theater that you actually had been to when you were a kid or something, go mark on it that I was there. And this map became the aggregation of everyone leaving little comments and flags about the drive in theaters they had visited and a funny little story about when they were at that drive in theater. And this, it was very simple. It was really just a map that let you tag these little comments on these points on the map that everyone could see as other people were adding tags. Well, this thing went viral. It really, you know, something about drive in theaters got captured people's imaginations and.

This thing went fast moving water.

And we thought, wow, we have really figured it out. You know, this is, this is going to be the new way in which you tell stories to people on the Internet. And when it went viral, we thought, we're really in the money now. You know, all we have to do is put some advertising on this or whatever. Well, we had added advertising to this site. But we weren't very sophisticated about it. And we discovered that out of these millions and millions of views, we made about 8 cents. And the reason was Google had decided this site did not conform to their standards of what they're willing to display ads on. And I won't tell you the whole story, but we were just so let down after all this work, and people loved it, and yet we couldn't make any money out of it. And that was the genesis of what became Slickstream is let's put some of this energy into helping the publishers who are already out there struggling with that same question of how can I make some money out of this in a way that has integrity and lets them build that revenue? So that was really at the genesis of Slickstream. And you can see it's coming from a very different place. We weren't. The technology we're developing there had nothing to do with what eventually became Slowstream. But we started to realize, if we can't make money doing this, let's help the people who are already trying to build content make money. And in doing that, what we realized was we knew that SEO had had a lot of attention, and we knew that really, if you think about it, the amount of money you make, and we've proven this now with data since then, the amount of money you make from a site is really directly proportional to how much time people spend on your site. So just as important to have one person spend twice as much time on your site as having twice as many people come to your site and spend half the amount of time. So we've decided to focus on engagement. That was the genesis of what is Slickstream? And then from there, it actually was the easy part to start thinking, oh, what kind of gadgets or could we do on the site? And as you will have remembered, I had 25 different ideas for things that might go on the site and affect that. And so we've tried to narrow that down over time.

And one of the things that's been interesting for me to see is even with some of those ideas, as you start to build them out, it can be like a really beautiful implementation. It can work really well. It can work exactly like you thought it would. But this is the thing that's been inspiring for me as we've worked together, is if the data doesn't support the success of that thing, you just kind of throw it out. It's like, this isn't going to work. We either evolve it or we go on to the next thing to try and Find something that does work based on the data. I feel like that's such a hard thing to do when you've put time and energy into creating a beautiful thing. But if it doesn't prove itself to let it go, is that an important part of the process? And as a team, is that hard to build something, test it, then realize that maybe it's not going to work, and then let it go?

It's really, really hard. I have to tell you that you get emotionally attached to something you created, and it's really hard when the data is telling you something you don't want to hear. In the last company I did, before this one, it was a very different thing. It was actually a company that was going to help people testing their websites and automating that testing. And I went out when we started the company and talked to a lot of this was targeted at large enterprises, not really the blogging community. We'd go out to VPs of engineering and say, hey, we have these new ideas for how we could really automate the creation of a lot of this testing for websites, and are you interested in that? And they would say, oh my God, this is my biggest problem. If you can solve that problem, I'll spend anything. And we thought, oh my God, we're really in the money now. This is going to be great. So we invented all this technology that was really awesome, and it would allow a test engineer to just basically walk through a scenario on a website and it would actually build all the scripts and everything so that he didn't have to understand all the technology required to automate the process. And we showed it to these VP of engineering and they thought, oh, this is awesome. I'm really going to like this. Well, we took it into their test engineering groups and we just couldn't get anyone to use it. It just, no matter how good it was, they said, well, that's not the way we do things here. And we just kept changing the product, trying to adapt, and we never really succeeded. We eventually found a path to success and we sold the company to a larger testing company. And this is one of their biggest products now. But it's taken 10 years for that to take hold. And we eventually had to accept the fact that this wasn't suitable for a Silicon Valley startup. But that's a great example of where you really, you, you think you've got the right answer. But the data in this case, the test engineers were just telling you, you know, we don't do it that way. We're not going to Use it.

Right. And it's also, I think it's, it's inspiring to see that because of leaning into data. And I know that a lot of people who listen to the podcast and are part of this community aren't necessarily data people. So would you have any recommendations for how people can, even on a 101 basic level, start to fold in data to some of their decision making? And then after that we can talk about some specifics of slickstreaming, including how we can access data within Slickstream?

Sure, yeah. I have a belief that anyone who's gone into Google Analytics and spent 20 minutes realizes there's more data than you'll ever know what to do with. Right. Screen after screen after screen. And now you can put a filter on and you can look over different timeframes. There's an inordinate amount of data to look at. So quickly what you realize is everyone kind of goes cross eyed and just closes it because I don't know what to do with it. It's too much. What I think is the right answer is to decide even arbitrarily, what are the top three? We call them KPIs, key performance indicators. Just pick some that you think, okay, those are indicators of success. And some people might just pick something simple as how many page views am I getting or how many new visitors am I getting, or how many return visitors? You decide. And I think just saying, okay, I just have a number, I see it every day. Is it going up or is it going down? And once you get in this pattern of even if there's one or two or three numbers, I keep looking at them every day and what are they telling me? What's going to happen, I predict is you're going to say, oh, they're failing to really tell me this part of the story. So I need a new one or I need to change one of the ones I have. So what we've been trying to do philosophically is to say we'll give you a fair amount of data, but we're trying to give it to you in a simple enough way so that you can kind of focus on the one part of it that is important to you. Let me give you an example. So one of the sites who recently came on and joined us, a fairly large site, their most important thing, they really thought it's important to us that our, our viewers really love our stuff. So this favorites feature that slickstream has, that's their number one thing they want to see if they put this on how many people are favoriting things and which of their content is getting more and more or less favorites. We have a lot of other data than that, but for them, that's the first thing they really want to focus on. And I think it's a positive. Don't try to solve all problems at the same time. Go pick one or two things that you think are what you want to be working on and make those things better and then have a pattern for a strategy. Like, if I want that number to go up, what are the possible things I could do to try to make it go up and try them.

Yeah, that's great. And that's one of the. An interesting reality with KPI's data decision making for people who aren't necessarily data people is that sometimes a better product is not going to have this overwhelming amount of data that it's giving you and that allows you to have fewer things to look at and an easier understanding of things and kind of the simplicity of how you're interacting with it. So let's talk. Let's talk about some of the specifics of slickstream. So for people who have visited Pinch of Yum, and as you mentioned before, more and more sites are starting to use it, so they're becoming familiar with it. There's probably a familiarity with Slick Stream, even if you don't know that that's what it is. It's not something that's like heavily branded. So you're not seeing mentions of slickstream everywhere. But if you have been to Pinch of Yum, you'll know this from your interactions with it. So let's kind of break down the core components of it, starting with the idea of Favoriting. And on Pinch of ym, you can see this as a little heart in the bottom, whether on mobile or desktop. And that's right by the search as well. But let's start by talking about feature favoriting. What is that and how does that work? And why is that such a simple but powerful tool?

Yeah, we probably all have experienced over the years these little hearts that show up on pages or in the older days you'd see those Facebook like buttons. And this was a way for viewers to kind of express satisfaction. But really what we concluded was they kind of have drifted away to a large extent because why would a viewer do that? Yes. Okay. It's nice. And is there real data there? We didn't know. What we wanted to do was to tie this together with something that had an incentive for a viewer. They really want to remember that this was a recipe. They really Loved. And they're going to want to come back to it again later. That's a favorite as opposed to a like. And we realized that if we bonded those two things together, now there's a win win. Now we have a publisher hearing what people like, and that's linked to what the viewer is keeping a list of. And so that little heart, we try to make it as simple as possible, which is tap on the heart. You have made this page a favorite. You have told the publisher that you like it, and those two things go together. And then what we did was, although probably a lot of people don't even realize is on Pinch of Yum, you might sit on one of your popular pages and start seeing hearts fluttering out of that little button. What does that mean? It means that someone else, somewhere else in the world is on that page right now and they liked it. And this we try to do in an elegant way, but we also try to do it in a way that helps this viewer think about, oh, right, maybe I should do that too. So this is creating a community, trying to take advantage of a community effect. Right. This is that people are social. And when I see other people liking things, it's going to make me think about liking it too. So when you tap on that button, two things happen. One is some hearts flutter out, not only on your own screen, but on everybody else who's on that page. Right at the same time. But a second thing has happened, which is it has been adding that page to your list of favorites. But how did that happen? We didn't want you to have to sign in before that happens. So we are keeping track of your favorites up to the point where you've got enough of them that it's interesting to you to say, well, I want to make sure I save those. And at that point, you might enter an email address so that you'll never lose those.

Yep. So this is otherwise tracked via a cookie.

It's actually stored inside your local browser. But yes, same idea. We don't use it.

Same idea. Okay, got it.

And so this favorites feature is interesting because you spoke about data a minute ago. We're fascinated because on most sites we're seeing something like 3 to 5% of all page views result in someone expressing that page as a favorite, which is.

A really high number for an interaction on a page.

And so you think, well, so what? That's just going to be a lot of little heart spluttering. It turns out that if you look at the content analytics, some really neat stuff happens. Is it's not just 3% or 4%. It turns out that the better posts have more likes on them. And now suddenly a publisher has something to work on. Look at this. It's got twice as many favorites as my other posts. That must be telling me something about what people like better.

Yeah.

And so this is an example of engagement through content quality. You know, our view is ultimately, the value of the site is nothing we're going to add to it. Ultimately, the value of the site is the content that the publisher is putting on it. So we're trying to help it.

And it's interesting. Even within the analytics area, I can see for Pinch of Yum number one, I haven't looked at this specific screen in a while. It's interesting to see the actual. The number of total favorites for a Pinch of Yum, which at this point is like 1.38 million, which I had no idea that it was that high. But it's really cool to see that there are people who have tagged this or favorited different posts within Pinch of Yum. And then thousands of people a day are interacting with that and favoriting those recipes. And those are probably people who wouldn't otherwise be interacting or engaging or, you know, bookmarking or whatever it would be that content. So obviously there's other ways that maybe there's, you know, they're not bookmarking it instead favoriting it. And there might be some of that, but the basic idea is like you're kind of capturing readers who otherwise would come and then leave, especially as it relates to search and as it relates to Pinterest. Those aren't necessarily loyal readers. And the other thing that I see on this page that's interesting is it doesn't rank order top favorites by number. It rank orders by percentage of page views, which, as you talked about, is really valuable for us because we can see, okay, there's 6.5% of people that visit the peach cobbler recipe on Pinch of Yum favorite that that's telling us something in terms of that piece of content and people's interest in that as compared to one that maybe has a lower percentage of favorites.

Exactly. And I think that that is the secret sauce. It's up to the publisher to try to figure out. Now, I wonder why they like the peach cobbler better. But at least now I have some data to work on.

Yep. So that is the favorite area, if you want to. It's hard to. Hard to explain this stuff on a podcast, but if you want to experiment with it, you can go to Pinch of Yum on mobile or desktop and you'll see that in the bottom right. And then right below that is search. And one of the things that I love about this version of search is that I've always been a little bit disappointed with the search results from WordPress and not only the quality of the results, but also the speed at which you can refine and adjust your search. And the great thing about slickstream search is that it's real time. So it's, it's adjusting and changing your results based on the words that you're typing in real time. So somebody can kind of, you know, drill down to the piece of content that they're trying to find without needing to do multiple searches within WordPress. So can you talk about why search was important to build in and kind of what's involved with that as it relates to slickstream?

Yeah, so we think about engagement as being sort of a many dimensional thing. But at the end of the day, what is it about? Someone comes to a webpage, maybe they, most of the time they probably googled something and landed up on your page. At that point, maybe this page is exactly what they were looking for. And now they're there, they're going to fully absorb. In the case of Pinch of Yum, that might be a recipe that's exactly what they wanted. They wanted peach cobbler and this looks like a great recipe. In that case, we want to be out of the way and let them absorb that content. But when they're finished absorbing that content, Google has sort of taught people, after you finish a page, go back to Google and do something else. And I kind of think that one part of our job is to be like the magazine aisle at the checkout at the grocery store, which is, hey, you're on your way out. Anyway, did you realize that there's a new edition of People magazine? You might as well take a look at it. And in particular on these sites, we know that publishers are very proud of the fact that they have hundreds of pieces of content that they've created in the past that are really good stuff. And I often hear people talk about buried treasure. I've got all this stuff and people don't even realize it's there. We're kind of in the business of trying to make that more available to people. So when it comes to search, if you've given someone a good experience on the page that they've landed on, it's so easy for someone to say, well, I wonder if they have any other peach Recipes that might be interesting. And so to the extent that the content is engaging the user, we want that user to feel they're right there, just one step away from finding the other good stuff right here on that site. So this site search we thought of as in. In one scenario, a user is. Has a question in their mind and we want to give them a fabulous experience to find out the answer to that question, if that question is, do they have something? And so we put a lot of energy into making that a really good search experience. And compared with WordPress, where, yeah, I mean, the WordPress search is kind of mechanical and it works okay. We've just tried to make it that much better in several different dimensions. In particular, what you just mentioned, I think is important, which is especially on recipe sites, on food sites, people are very visual. And so to the extent as you're typing images of the food that might be relevant to you are coming up, just like the results are coming up very quickly, I can see something that's going to catch my attention and draw me in. And so that's why we worked really hard to get search just right.

Yeah. And it reminds me of what you were talking about earlier, where it's your why, and one of your whys is because you want to create things that are used and make experiences better and people's lives better. And a small microcosm version of that is search like, it's a great experience, it feels good, it works how you'd expect it to work. So you can see kind of that manifested in different parts of slickstream, which is really cool to see. So that's kind of in the bottom right. We also have integrated that in on Pinch of Yum, just as a standard, the standard search. So we've replaced the WordPress search altogether. So when you click on our search bar, it brings up the slickstream search. Another thing that's been interesting to see develop is this, what's called the film strip. And I think people would be familiar with that in the sense of like, oh, it's recommending other similar pieces of content, but there's actually a lot more going on with that in terms of kind of smart AI. I don't know if that is too buzzy of a word, but there's learning, there's some machine learning that's going on behind the scenes to continually make the film strip better at recommending content that people will actually click on. So can you kind of explain what filmstrip is, where people would see it and how that works? Yeah.

So first of all the idea of recommended next things to look at is of course not a new idea. There's lots of WordPress plugins that are doing that kind of thing. However, we kind of were of the view that I go to a site and I recommend you do this. Just pick any site you want and go look for the section on recommendations at the bottom of the post or in the sidebar. And I predict that what you're going to see is you're looking at a post for, let's call it Peach Cobbler. And what am I going to see a recommendation for is these new braised spare ribs or something, which happens to be something that the publisher seems very proud of. It's a new one or, you know, it's been popular in the past. And what we realized is that's not how people think. If I came here looking for Peach Cobbler, I'm going to find it kind of gross thinking about, you know, pork barbecue right now. What we really need to do is try to get into the psychology of the person who is on this site. And if we want to do that, we actually went through quite a large study looking at exactly these questions. Should I show the most popular? Should I show the most current? Should I show some mix? What should I do? It turned out that the data told us black and white. If you have other content on your site that's related to the content that the viewer is already on, that's by far going to have the most likelihood of someone clicking through and saying, oh, I see Peach Cobbler. I see you also have this butterscotch cobbler. Yeah, I want to check that out too. It turns out that relevance is a very high determining factor of whether people are going to go there. And so what we have learned is start with the idea of relevance is an important way to give you a first pass on figuring out what you want to offer people who come to the site. Then the next thing to realize is pinch of yum. For example, you guys are getting a lot of people visiting every week, and those people in that volume has the potential to give you huge amounts of data. If you look at that from the perspective of your WordPress server, the server is sitting behind Cloudflare or pick your favorite cdn, which means that all of your pages are getting cached out at the edge of the cloud. And so your WordPress server never gets to see who's doing what on your pages. By comparison, slickstream, we sit separately out in the cloud and we talk directly into the browser when the viewer Is there. So we're getting every click, every scroll, we can see all of that data. And because we have that data, it's what you were just talking about is we can put that data into a big machine that is now saying, oh, we see that, yeah, there's a butterscotch cobbler at the top that we've placed there and beside that is a peach Melba and so forth. There's a bunch of these things. But you know what, that one, that's third or fourth down in the list, it seems like that's getting clicked more often. And so what we're doing is saying based on a lot of factors, we're actually slowly shuffling the contents that we're showing in those recommendation lists for each different article to put the best possible thing there that people really are using the most. And so there's a lot of fancy stuff going on that to you just looks like, oh, I wonder how they figured out that all the peach recipes are the good ones. Well, there's a lot behind that.

Yeah. And there's something that I really love about this tool. Working behind the scenes to continually tweak and adjust and get a little bit better. I think it's one of the things that doesn't really exist on a site like Pinch of Yum or most publishing sites is this any layer of kind of smartness, to use a not smart word. But you know, like Amazon, you go and it's tweaking, it's just adjusting, changing. You know that they're optimizing to display content that is most relevant to you. Previous content you bought, you know, suggesting that you sign up for a subscription for something you bought multiple times that doesn't really exist for a quote unquote normal publishing site. And so it's nice to start to layer on some of that, to know that there's some work happening that isn't work that you're having to do manually. Creating content, it's kind of refining the content that you have to get it better to, to, to really lean into kind of this idea of engagement. And that's what Slickstream is all about. This idea of engagement. It's not about how do we increase traffic necessarily, it's about how do we increase the effectiveness of that traffic once people get there.

Another thing to just say, Bjork, is that one thing that a lot of successful companies know is that it's great if something goes viral and you make a lot of money, but the continuous long term growth that turns the big companies into long term successes and what we're trying to do is to realize that most web publishers are not all that sophisticated about data, but to the extent that we can be their partner and we can say, oh, we're constantly working in the background trying to find the ways to make things a little bit better all the time. And if you've looked at the pinch of yum data, I think you will see that there is this slow up and to the right trend in the data. And some of that is you guys getting better about your content, some of that is us getting better about recommendations and search. But that's what happens over, you know, many months and years. You see that steady long term growth. And so we have another dozen ideas that we're working on about what are other ways in which we can kind of make that slight continuous improvement across. And we also want to find more and more ways in which we can give very actionable data back to the publisher. You know, if we could tell you, oh, did you notice that this particular post is not doing well for this reason? And that's actionable, that's something that we hope publishers will find very valuable. So we've got a lot of innovation to come and some of that comes from the idea that we can get access to the data for a site.

Yeah, it's been interesting to see some of those ideas and like I referenced before, some of those being implemented and then sticking with those and starting to improve those, testing out some of those and saying, maybe this isn't something that we should pursue going, going down the line and to see multiple iterations of that, always working towards that gradual, slow improvement. And something that we talk about on the podcast all the time. I have this concept of 1% infinity and it fits in perfectly with how Slickstream works where it's getting a little bit better every day. And somebody asked me recently, they said, hey, Will, I'm interested in Slickstream. Will it have a massive impact on my blog? It's like there might be some things that you can do that will have a massive impact on your life or your blog or your relationships or whatever it might be. Those things do exist in the world. But what we've found is that we are better off when we seek the slow, continual, gradual, foundational type improvements. And we found that to be true with the enhancements that we get from Slickstream. And it's been fun to see that over time. So one of the things that was actually done recently that I thought would be worth mentioning as kind of a last thing to talk about, was an actual study that was an AB test. So for those who aren't familiar, an A B test means it's also called a split test. But the idea is you show a certain segment of people one thing and you show another segment of people another thing and then you compare the results of that and to see if there was an impact. And it could be with medical studies or it could be with websites. And in our case, obviously it was with a website. And we said, what is the impact of using some of these engagement, this engagement suite from Slickstream as it relates to all these different metrics? I don't have that pulled up, but I'm wondering if you remember some of the significant data that came out of that as we kind of wrap up so people can know, hey, as we've talked about, we're making all these decisions based on data. Here's some of the important things that we learned from that study as it relates to using Slickstream and layering that over the site.

Yeah, there's a couple of things that stand out in my mind from that study we did. The first is you can imagine that we've added this film strip of recommendations across the top and we've added these search buttons and these favorites buttons and you think, okay, well, we've given new ways for people to navigate your site and to go to more page views. And you say, okay, well great, I must be really adding a lot of value because look, people are clicking on my widgets all the time. We know that's happening. The one thing from the study, well, let me just say typically across all of our publisher sites, if you look at the number of clicks that happen on the page, because we see every click on the page, the number of clicks that go on a page to get to another page on your site. Different sites have different click through rates. But once you add widgets onto the site, the Slickstream widgets onto the site, we typically see that somewhere between 15 and 25% of all the clicks that are going from one page to another page on your site are starting to use our widgets to do that. One of the big questions in our minds was, well, that's great, we obviously are being used people, the viewers must like these widgets because they're using them a lot. And you say, well yeah, but what if the widgets weren't there? Would they just be clicking through just as much anyway? And that's a really important question to answer because, you know, if they're going to click through anyway, why do I add More stuff onto my page. What we were from doing this a B test. We actually compared people who were clicking through on the. Sorry, people who did have the widgets on the page and people who never saw Slickstream widgets because we took them away. And we compared that data and we said, oh, here's something really surprising if you think about with slickstream widgets are getting this many clicks on those widgets to go to another page on the site. Well, that must be that they're not clicking on some of the other links that are on the page. And it turns out that the amount we decrease the number of clicks using the links that are already on the page just slightly by 1 or 2% and all those widget clicks that are happening just turn out to be more clicks that are happening. So the net increase in page views on the site is more or less, it turns out very similar to the number of people the times people are clicking on widgets. It's kind of an easy how much more traffic am I get? Well, it's more or less the additional widget clicks turn into additional page views.

Yeah.

But the other notable thing that I think we found was that when you look at the number of page views per session, in other words, how many page views are people having on a site we were having trouble understanding how can it be that we're adding so many more of these widget clicks but the actual page views on the site is not going up hugely. Amount like if we're adding 10% more, why isn't the number of page views on the whole site going up by 10%? We found something really fascinating which is on sites like in the food space, it turns out that when you have multiple page views in a session, the majority of those are actually just caused from browser actions, people hitting refresh or even the browser itself autonomously refreshing. That was a fascinating thing for us to learn is a lot of page views do just come from these browser actions which aren't necessarily humans making choices. The ability for us to totally impact overnight your page views are going to grow by 25%. We'd love that if it were true. But you have to do this in stages. What we've learned is we are having a good positive impact on incremental traffic to the website. But that ability for us to affect it isn't as big as you might think.

Basic idea being, a lot of times when people think about layering in a new tool or a new product like hey, this will 3x something or 2x something, but as you mentioned before, it's less about this massive. You know, I have 100,000 page views and now I have 200,000 page views. But instead it's saying, how do we get, how do we squeeze. And this is a phrase I've used a little bit too often on the podcast, but I'll continue to do it. How do we squeeze the juice out of this site a little bit more and to be more intentional about it. And that might look like an additional 3% or 5% or 6% in the AB test and the study that we did, which was interesting. We. I don't remember the exact. We'll link to it in the, in the show notes for this and you can check it out or you could go to the Slickstream blog and check it out. But the Slickstream group, the, the. If it's an A B test, the Slickstream group resulted in 17.6% more clicks on content. And you can kind of do the math with that as it relates to rpm and it's not going to be exact, but you can kind of get an idea of how that works. And I would encourage anybody who's interested to go ahead and check that out because there's going to be data that you can look at that kind of supports it, because I think that's the theme. One of the themes for this podcast has been data supporting decisions that we're making. And that being such an important part, obviously with what Slickstream is doing as well. So if there are people who are interested in checking this out and using the tool, one of the things that I know is true is that there is, it's not a, it's, it's not a plugin. And I think it's important to point that out. As you mentioned, there's server costs, there's doing. There's. There's calculations that are happening. There's a back end to it. So I think it's important to uncouple this idea of a plugin that you add that's, you know, like a wptasty plugin, which is code that we code up and then you put it on your site and you pay some $79 a year. This is actual servers that are running behind the scenes. There's a cost to keep it up. So it's more of a SaaS application software as a service than it is a plugin. And there's an inherent cost that goes with running those machines like you talked about behind the scenes, but it's also relatively affordable for people who are in the early stages. And I know that you've kind of been talking about what specifics look like with pricing, if people are interested in checking that out, if they're interested in you, I know you're in the early stages of onboarding people. There was a waiting list at one point. Where are things at with that right now? Kingston. And how can people check out Slickstream if they want to potentially use it on their site?

Yeah. So if you just go to slickstream.com, you'll find our website and it has a lot of information there. You can see the, you know, how all the things work and we talk a little bit about it. And in fact, we've started building a blog there with some things we're learning. So that's still very early, but you might find something interesting there. But on that website, you'll see the pricing, which we have a minimum price, but basically we just take a very small part of. We charge a little bit for every thousand page views, which hopefully is a very tiny amount of the RPM that the publisher is making. And so, as you know, our work goes up as the size of the site goes up. And so the price we charge goes up as well on that. You'll also just see a button where you can ask to join the program. And what we do, once you just give us your email address and what website you have, we do all the work so that by the time we reach back to you, we're all ready to go. And your stuff could be up just by adding one embed code at the top of your pages. We do have a WordPress plugin, but all it does is add an embed code at the top of your pages. So it's very, very simple. All of our work goes on on the server side, so the backlog we have now, we've got that way down. We had a lot of people who have expressed interest, and we've just gotten faster and faster at bringing people on board. And so for most of the people who have been signing up Lately, within 24 hours, we're back to you and ready to go on your site. And people seem real happy with that. So I think we're ready to go when people want to try it out.

Awesome.

We use a waiting list, just, by the way, because we see these sort of. Oh, a lot of people just found out at us. And so we need to have a list so we don't let people just sign up themselves and do it automatically. We need to be involved.

Yep, that makes sense. And it's one more thing that I want to mention that people can follow along with as a. As a. As a kind of a P.S. this is kind of like the credits have rolled and then now it's like at the end of a Marvel movie you see the little teaser. But one of the things that we've been experimenting with, that you've talked about before, you know, you've talked about these ideas that you're trying out is slick stories, and that's embedding Instagram like stories within a blog post. We won't get into the details on that, but. But there is a little waiting list or notification list for when that goes live. We've been testing it out with Pinch of Yam a little bit. So I do want to mention that as kind of a stay tuned moment, a little bit of a teaser as we wrap up the podcast. So, Kingston, it's been so great to work with you. It's been really fun to hear a little bit about your story, which I hadn't heard before, and then talking about slickstream and knowing that it helps accomplish that core that why that you talked about, which is helping people in what they're doing, creating something in the world that people interact with and get value out of. So appreciate you coming on the podcast and have appreciated working with you, Kingston.

Yeah, it's been really fun. YouTube, Bjork.

And that's a wrap, my friend. Thanks again for tuning into the podcast this week. We hope you love learning more about engagement and why it's just so gosh darn important for bloggers and creators. And you know what else is important? Podcast reviews. Sorry, horrible joke. But seriously, podcast reviews help the Food Blogger Pro podcast so very much. And it only takes a few minutes. Just head on over to Apple Podcasts, find the show, and leave us a review. Simple as that. We'll be back here next week with an interview that I'm personally extremely excited about, and I think you will be too. It's with a blogger you've probably already heard from. You've definitely heard from her on the podcast before, and she'll talk about a topic that's really hot in the industry right now. Intrigued? Well, we'll see you next time. And until then, make it a great week.