296: Web Stories - An Informal, Intentional Way to Engage Your Audience and Reach New People with Kingston Duffie

Hey, folks, Bjork here. Excited to share an episode this week with a repeat guest, somebody who was on back in December of 2019 when the world was more normal. But the great thing is Kingston Duffy from Slickstream has continued with his team to build an incredible product in Slickstream. If you want to hear more about Slickstream and what it is and just the idea of building engagement and not just traffic, check out episode 231. That's foodblockerpro.com 2:31. If you want to jump to that episode, we call it a better experience, building engagement, not just traffic. And in this episode, we're actually going to drill down into a really specific thing that has been kind of trending within the publisher space. Not just food sites, but a lot of times you'll see it on food blogs and recipe sites, but it's stories. It's a new medium. It's actually an old medium in a new place, which is the web. We were really familiar with it in places like Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook, but it's starting to decouple from just being connected to apps or social apps. And you're starting to see that show up around the web. And we've been experimenting that with Pinch of Yam, and we've seen a lot of other people experiment with it as well. We talk about how to do stories well, why it's important, what the benefit is, and some of the ways that it can translate into income for your site. It's great. Interview with Kingston Duffy from Slickstream. Excited to jump in. Kingston, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Bjork.

Good to have you here. Really excited to chat. We're gonna be talking about all things stories, but you were previously on the Food Blogger Pro podcast and we're chatting kind of about your story. Can you kind of give the elevator pitch? Because you've been at this kind of startup game for a really long time and you talk about that kind of in depth. It's episode 231 back at a time when like the, the world was a very different place in 2019. So we're to think back to that. But if people want to check that out, they can go to foodbloggerpro.com 2, 3, 1 to check out that episode. But your quick story, Kingston, your backstory and where you are right now with Slickstre.

Sure. So Slickstream has been around for a few years now. We're in Silicon Valley. I'm in Palo Alto, California. And we've been focused on really the next generation of where the web is going in general. In fact, I come from a sequence of startups here in Silicon Valley. I've created a few of them, and this is one that I created a few years ago. And we tried a few different ideas until we landed on this question of what is going on with the next generation of content on the web. And so we looked to see where we could help. And what we realized was there's a.

Lot of people creating really good content.

Out there, but in terms of the structure of a lot of websites, there's a lot of things missing. And so we, we found what I think is a pretty good place for us helping web publishers make their websites better by making their content more accessible to their visitors.

So we're all about this thing called.

Content engagement, which is how do people come into your website, find stuff that.

You didn't, you know, that they didn't.

Realize you had, or if they're looking for something very specific, making sure they find it well.

So those kinds of things are what.

We really focus on. And we're what is called a SaaS software as a service. So we're something that sits up in the cloud and provides a service on top of your website.

Yeah. What's been so fun? I've had the privilege of advising just kind of from a publisher perspective. So it's saying, like, here's kind of, you know, in our specific niche, in our specific industry, some of the things that we're saying. So have a vested interest as an advisor, but also as a user of slickstream in the success of the company. But it's been really fun for me to work with you because one of the things that I, that I see that is so clear is like being data driven. And what's been inspiring is, is seeing how willing you are to let an idea go if it's not working. And it seems like, man, you spend time and energy creating something, but then you can let it go. But what happens is then you get to this point where you have these things that are working really well. And we were just talking about that before, like the ad revenue impact, starting to get into analyzing that and being able to see, like, here's how that, here's how that lifts things. We were talking about that on, on desktop and doing a lot of like a B testing. But can you, can you talk about, you know, your kind of thesis? This is me geeking out on it. Like when it comes to building a company, when it comes to a startup, what does that look like for you in these early stages, as you're finding product market fit and having to make hard decisions, but also move quickly. What does that look like for you as an entrepreneur?

It reminds me of a meeting I had many years ago with one of the big venture capitalists who ended up being on one of my early boards of directors, a guy named Jeff Yang. And Jeff really is a very insightful guy about the startup world. And I remember him saying to me, he was by this point on our board of directors and he said, well, what we're really looking for is the fast moving water. And I thought about that a lot and realized that to some extent there is forcing yourself to a place where you're profitable or you're growing fast, or there's simply allowing yourself to float around in the river until you catch the current. And I think that it is a combination of those two things that you have to be willing to paddle around really hard, but if you're not paying attention to where the current is, you're not really going to catch the big opportunity. And so, you know, the letting go is all about the fact that you're sitting over in a, in an eddy in a pool on the side of the river and you're paddling like crazy, but you're just not going anywhere. You have to be willing to just try a different direction. And then all of a sudden you find yourself, I'm in the middle of a current. So in the case of Slick Stream, we had tried a number of different things. Like one of the early things we tried was this idea that we would allow publishers to establish what we called a guild where they would work together and create this new idea of a joint subscription where instead of being ad based, maybe they make money by creating a publication that spans many different publishers. And I love that idea, this idea that maybe you can make money through subscriptions where you yourself are too small, but in a team of other bloggers you could make money. And we had to let it go because at the end of the day, that wasn't the way the market was working, that wasn't the way it was going at that time. That idea might come back again at someday, but that's an example of where you just need to let it go and move on with the way things work today.

Yeah, and one of the things that you talked about as your focus is focusing on where the web is going and specifically around publishing. And for us it's blogs. But publishing can look like a lot of different things. Would you be able to speak to that? It's like a really big question. Where do you think the web is going? Or is that too big of a question?

No, it's the right question. For a number of years, especially after the iPhone came out, it looked like the whole market was saying, oh, the future is apps. Everything's going to be apps and the web's just going to be old fashioned websites for companies. And there really was this sort of stream of consciousness, at least in Silicon Valley, where if you're doing web stuff that's kind of old school, everything's apps. What we've really seen in the last few years is a recognition that apps really, really are successful for specific purposes. But in terms of where innovation is happening, it has really come back to the web. And I think that the big reason for that is it's so accessible. Every device you have has a browser on it and your experience on any different device is the same on the browser. Whereas you get to the app world and is there an app for it? And I still have to install the app and I don't have that on this device. It means that apps are sort of slowing down in terms of innovation and the web is continuing to move fast. I think we're going to chat about web stories today and that's one example of something that I think is coming on fast and heavy on the website because everyone can innovate on a relatively level playing field. So I'm excited about the web because it's a core set of technology and you know, there's no one company that completely dominates and that makes for a great position for companies like us that are small.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about back to when apps first came out and I can imagine that time. And it's like the thing was I have an idea for an app. Right. Or it's like, have you seen this app or downloaded this app? And that's still true today, but I think it's shifted more towards functional like it's Uber or it's Instagram. It's really a specific purpose as opposed to maybe something that's kind of catch all that you use for everything like the web.

And I think a lot of apps are. I was just going to say that a lot about apps are something that you're using multiple times per week. That's a great example of where an app that has a very specific purpose is really great. It's these infrequent used ones that are the problem.

Yeah, but there is such thing as a web app and that would be like an app that's run on, on the Internet. You use a browser and you log into it. That would be something that would be like slickstream. So you said software as a service. Would you say that's synonymous with like web app? So it's an application on the web, software as a service. Do you see those things as kind of the same thing?

Yeah, I think when I hear the word web app, what lights up in my mind is this distinction between flat content and interactive content. And of course that's a blurry line, but at one end of the spectrum you have an old fashioned webpage that's just some photos with some text around it. And at the other end of the spectrum you have a web page that you're really interacting with and it's animated content. As you click things, it does different things. It's really an app. And so the nice thing about the web is it's that same technology. It's just. Do you want it as just marked up content or do you really want it as something that's interactive? I think that we're in the business, in fact of intentionally bringing those two things together. If you look at a food blog, for example, the focus of the food blog might be the recipe card and the photos that go with it, which is relatively static content. The recipe isn't changing. But look at that recipe card. Now there's a button on it that will change the units from English to metric, or there's something that will dynamically calculate nutrition for you or quantities. Those are already interactive elements coming into the web. And we just take that a big step further so that when you think about dynamically populating content inside that page. Search is a great example of that is I want an interactive experience. I don't just want static search results. I want to see them change as I'm, as I'm typing, that kind of thing. So we're really trying to bring the best of the web to the world. That used to be old fashioned.

Yeah, it really. One of the thoughts that I love when I think about Slickstream is this, like you said, most sites, most blogs, especially food and recipe sites, relatively static. Static, meaning you go to the page and then you see the text, you see the photos and maybe you see like a video from YouTube or if you have an ad video player, maybe that's loaded in and, and that's kind of the extent of the interaction. But what's exciting to me is kind of evolving that and starting to become, whether it's more animated or to engage more and you can see that with Pinch of Yam. If you go to Pinch of Yam and you know, an example would be search like you said. So slickstream has super powerful search. So we can go and I can search, I have it pulled up right now. I could search Taco and it automatically pulls up the top results. It's kind of filtering as I'm doing it, much like you'd expect other search engines to kind of be giving you kind of real time feedback. And you can also see like, hey, I just want to see the category of tacos. So I can click into that. And another example is you might go into a post and if somebody's doing this on Pinch of Yum, you can look at it, you can scroll up. And then when you scroll up, there's this little thing called a film strip which gives recommendations on similar recipes. So it's kind of this layering effect that happens and kind of brings a little bit of life to your content. Also you can favorite a recipe and store it. So it's all of these things that are kind of giving life to content that otherwise would be pretty static, which is really fun to see. And one of the things that you talked about was this additional element of stories. And the interesting thing, when you think back to apps, stories kind of comes. It originated with apps. I think probably first it would be, it would be Snapchat and then Instagram essentially copied it. But can you talk about the history of stories and now how and maybe why we're starting to see that show up on the web and get kind of pulled out of apps?

Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying, I think it was back in 2015, 2016, that Snapchat and then Instagram started this idea of so called stories. And it kind of went from there. The background for those guys were photos. But of course by 2016, videos were becoming a big thing too. In terms of social media sharing. I think what people realized is that, and I think the Snapchat guys really found something which was this idea that an interesting photo is great or even an interesting video is great. But what I really want to do in a social media sense is know about you and what is, you know, you is your day. So the old Snapchat stuff, a story was simply the collection of the photos from one of, you know, from some day last week, that was your story that day. And that has evolved since then to this idea of a more intentional story in the sense of just like when you watch a Hollywood movie, it has an arc, it is a story you know, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And it's engaging because you're interested in that story, what happened. So you can kind of have the old fashioned stories which were, you know, the collection of photos from your day when you know, one thing happened and then later in the day something else happened. But an intentional story is really something where you are thinking creatively about how to tell a story that has that arc. And so today's stories that are now coming to the web I think are influenced by that idea of let's make these things a more intentional thing. And the web now brings them to everybody. I think that the issue in social media was they're trapped inside your social media feed. And now we really want to see, look, I've got a website and all the people coming to my website, I'd like them to see those stories I create. So I think that the history of it as being a social media centric idea is, you know, and of course stories are still very big in social media. But I think now what we're seeing is whether it's bloggers or even corporations, people are starting to see the compelling value of having these little story arcs that are told in images and videos on a very short format as opposed to long form video. Something that is very consumable and that has a very intentionality about, you know, that I want to tell you a little story and it may take you 15 seconds or it might take you a minute and a half depending on how interested you are, but then it's going to be over and we're done with. So the web is a great vehicle for making that happen and we're interested in being part of that.

Yeah. One of my favorite things is to think about kind of the outline or the short history of, of the web in relation to media. And it's like really early. You know, it's text and it's in its links and that's what it is. And then it evolves to, hey, you can include these really light graphics maybe and then eventually it's photos and then you can get like really grainy videos that just can barely stream. And eventually you can get to a point where bandwidth is available in enough places where you can pretty reliably stream video. So then video becomes important. What's interesting for me is stories feels like a, not the first, but an early version of something that is very much so like media that wasn't brought into the web to replicate something else. So like I think of a video and it's like, we're used to TVs, so it's horizontal. And then we had our computers. It's horizontal. And then you have your phone. It's not horizontal. Um, and I remember for a while, like, I don't know how long ago, but there's kind of this thing where it's like, oh, you'd kind of give your uncle a hard time. Cause he takes a picture with his phone or a video and he holds it upright. Like, he doesn't turn it to do it horizontal like that. It's like, well, you know, you gotta turn it horizontal to get the video. It's kind of the opposite now where, like, everything is built in a way where you're kind of assuming that you're watching it or consuming it on your phone. And stories being an example of that. And also the nature of like, tapping back and forth between it. My. My question is, like, what does that look like? How does that work? Because a video, it's like you play it and it just runs. You know, Instagram stories, they build that into their app so that you can interact with it in a certain way. How do you go about doing that functionality of like, adding text and going back and forth and even embedding when you take it out of the app?

Yeah, so that's the neat thing about the web is that it's the underlying. The core technology of the web has just been evolving quietly in the background for years. And so there have been standards emerging to make all of this stuff work really seamlessly. Just as you were saying. So for the case of authoring, you know, the web is an interactive place now. And so as you were just talking earlier about a web app, well, that web app can be an authoring experience. It can be a way in which you can create new content. And so one example of that, I think that is going to be familiar to some of the people listening is inside WordPress. If you're using WordPress as your. As your CMS, as your content management system, it itself is a web app. It's an interactive place where you're authoring content. Maybe you're just writing your new posts for your website, but it's also a place where you can author new content. Likewise, now in slickstream, some of the new stuff we're doing with Stories, that's a very interactive experience. It's a place where you could also author these stories inside slickstream and then put those on your website. So I do think we've gotten to a place now where you don't have to think about it, what is an app anymore? You might be thinking, oh, I'm going to use my phone to record some video. But that doesn't have to be recording it in the context of, let's say, Instagram. You could just be recording it straight onto your phone or recording it, in fact, right inside a web app. So it's pretty neat.

Yeah, that's great. So I think people will be familiar kind of with stories they've, you know, maybe use Snapchat, use Instagram stories in what you're seeing with people using slickstream, or even just web stories in general. Are you seeing people essentially just, like, pull down their Instagram stories and then upload those to have them be stories online? Or are you seeing people create original stories that are meant to be for the web? Maybe a little bit of both. What are you seeing?

Yeah, we're in this early phase of stories on the web, and so we're seeing all of the above. The easiest thing for people to do starting out was, if they were already creating Instagram stories, is to simply repurpose that content onto the web. And so suddenly, Instagram might make your stories go away after 24 hours, but there's no reason that has to be the case on the web. So that's an easy way, which is go take the content you already have for Instagram and just repurpose that onto the web and create a web story that is very much the same thing, except that now you just can show that as pages inside your website.

But I think we're also seeing that there's no reason to have to view it that way. In fact, I think it's actually better to be thinking, what is the story I'm trying to tell in my. You know, maybe in a web context? And that might not even be the same kind of story. But I don't need to go to Instagram to go capture that. I can just go capture that directly in the web if I want to do it that way. So it's really up to everyone as to what they're trying to accomplish. For some people, they've got a lot of Instagram content and they'd like to repurpose it. For others, they don't have, you know, Instagram isn't a big part of it, and there's no reason they have to start that way. They can just start directly in the web if they want.

Yeah, it's one of the things that I love about stories is I feel like the. The perceived barrier to entry is lower because there's there's something that happens, and this is the nuance of content creation in the web. But there's something that happens that feels more informal in a good way. When you're recording a story and you can record it in little snippets, it doesn't have to be a two minute video that you edit. And I think it's a great way for people to step into video creation is as they're making a recipe, pick up your camera, your phone along the way, press record and just record the steps and talk over it. You don't need a bunch of equipment, you don't need really good lighting. Most of the cameras have really good, or most of the phones have really good cameras. And you can upload that into multiple different places. But now the good thing is you can put that into a blog post. But my question is, what is the benefit of this? So obviously it's good to have video. It creates engaging content, it helps to explain abstract ideas. Are people supposed to embed this in a blog post? Do you upload it and then just Google, just magically find it? And if they do, how are they treating it? What are they doing with it?

Yeah, those are all good questions, but.

In fact, I was stimulated by your previous point. I just want to come back to it for a second.

You know, a lot of people are used to long form video, right? We might use the word YouTube, these things that are two to five minutes long, high production values, traditional video format. And we've all watched them. We've, you know, a lot of your listeners, I'm sure, have created those things and we have a lot of preconceptions about them. I just want to come to this interesting point, which is the most natural thing in the world is to sort of say, well, I know how to do that kind of stuff. I guess I'll just make stories out of it. And what you were saying is really a critical point here, which is the human nature of people watching stories. And I can tell you now we've got thousands of stories that we've seen data on. The stories that do the best are the stories that are the least formal in the sense that people are engaged by other people. And when we see a story that features, for example, the publisher, him or herself, just talking about what they're doing, often with their face on screen, those tend to be much more engaging for viewers. And I think that's just about sort of human dynamics as opposed to a highly formalized, highly edited, long form video. It just seems that social Media has taught people. I'm interested in people now. They probably are also very interested in the recipe you're creating, or maybe it's even a story about your dog. But they're interested in the real world. And so, just as you said, I strongly encourage people to just get in there and start and not be uptight about creating a highly structured, beautiful, formally edited thing.

Go ahead. Yeah, finish that thought.

I was just going to say that from there a lot of things just emerge, which is once you've agreed that you're not trying to do a highly edited thing, you find that the stories just kind of flow out then. And I was going to mention in particular that Lindsay, your wife, is particularly good at these. You know, if anyone is. If I were going to recommend anybody to look at some examples of some great stories, it would be hers. She really has a great presence in terms of being interesting to listen to her talk about what she's, you know, whatever the subject happens to be. And I've seen a lot of other stories being created that look a lot more like, oh, I'm going to show a picture of step three and overlay some text explaining what the ingredients are. That might be useful. It might be functional, but it's not very engaging by comparison. So I do encourage people to just be themselves and, you know, who cares whether your hair is perfect looking? You know, people are interested in you.

Yeah, that's great. There is. I was having a conversation with Andrew from NerdPress on. I think it was a live Q and A and he was talking about web stories. He's like, Google actually used on one of their, like web creator series, Lindsay's story, as an example. So I was like, oh my gosh, that's so awesome. So we pulled it up and it was actually about this idea of a web story, not a web teaser. Can you talk a little bit about why people were creating kind of these stories as teasers to content and maybe what your recommendation would be around an actual story all the way through versus just a teaser to get people to content.

Yeah, this is probably the biggest question that's lurking out there right now. And I should mention, by the way, this is very relevant that we're actually hosting a Q and A session in a few weeks with Google. We've been working with Google and their stories team and a lot of people have been asking us, well, which way should I make these things? What's going to get me the most traction? And they're often asking us questions that are about how Google will or won't do things. So this is going to be a great opportunity if people are interested. And I'll just mention that if you're interested in getting involved in that Q and A session, we're going to have a sign up at www.slickstream.com events and you can just go there and sign up. It's open to everybody. I think they're going to be on that call so they can answer a lot of questions as well. But let me give you it's rare.

That you are able to get that phone line into Google, so I encourage people to check that out. Again, just a reiterate. So people, and we'll include this in the show notes as well. Slickstream.com events and you'll have the signup info there.

That's it.

Okay, great.

So coming back to your question, and in fact your previous question is also exactly on point, which is why am I doing these web stories? And in my view, there are sort of three reasons. One is I'm going to create a web story because I'm hoping it's going to drive more traffic to my website. And a lot of people want that because of course, they make money from people visiting their website. So acquisition is one reason to do web stories. And the reason for that would be that Google in search or in what is called their Discover feed might expose your web stories. And let me come back to that in a minute. But acquisition is one reason. And the second reason is engagement, which is I already have people on my website every day and I know I have these web stories. And if I can use the web stories to keep them more interested in my content, to keep them longer on my site, that's got to be a good reason. The third reason is direct revenue itself. And this is probably what Google is pushing more than anything else, which is the idea that web stories themselves can have ads integrated inside the web stories. So they could be a way to generate new revenue that you haven't had before because of ads inside the web stories themselves. So those are three different reasons to do a web story. But in answer to your question, on the question of teasers, so there's sort of a what is the story? And this could be in fact, I often like to say a web story is very much aligned with a children's book. Have you ever thought about a children's book? I'm sure you have a lot lately.

Bjork. Totally.

A children's book is a short thing, often, let's call it 8 to 12 pages long each Page just has a few words on it and a pretty picture. Boy, that sounds a lot like a web story. And it's not a coincidence. This is a highly consumable thing that is meant to engage young children. And it needs to be visual, it needs to have an arc. You know, the kid wants to hear a story about the dog or about the day at the beach. And so the web story is the same thing. It's meant to engage you and tell you a story. So on this question of teasers, so think of a teaser as a story whose main job is to get you to come back to a website. So if I see a web story up, for example, directly inside a Google product, like Google Search or Google Discover, and I say, oh, that's interesting, I'm going to go and look at the corresponding recipe. Obviously they go to the recipe and now that publisher is going to make some money from the advertising that's being presented on the recipe. So this is the teaser concept where I don't really want you to be finished when you watch the story. I kind of want to bring you to somewhere else. The trouble with teasers are that a teaser is inherently an advertisement. You're advertising someone to come to do something else. And the trouble with a teaser is it isn't very satisfying in and of itself. You know that we know that super bowl ads, for example, can be extremely interesting. Like we people will watch the super bowl just to watch the ads. But these are highly produced ads. You know, they put.

And a lot of times they are stories.

They are stories because those advertisers know that getting their brand snuck into something that is very engaging can work, but it's hard to do that. So I'll give you my opinion, which is if you write a story, create a story that is extremely engaging in its own right front to back, you're definitely going to have viewers who are more interested as opposed to a teaser, which would be, you know, here's three photos from me making a recipe and please come to see the full recipe. Let's call that a teaser as opposed to. While I was making the recipe today, a funny thing happened. And let me explain how, you know, let me tell you how this recipe really works. And isn't it really interesting that if you overcook it, it's here's what happens. That's a story. The advantage of that story as opposed to the teaser is, is you're going to really engage people, they're going to be interested in that story, and you're going to get people viewing it. What you may not get is the people who are saying, oh, I just need to see the rest of the details on this so they will definitely come to your website. It is my view right now, without much data to back it up, that this is like the super bowl ads, that in some sense to the extent that you're showing these stories up in Google, it's still going to work in your benefit even if it's not just a teaser because you're going to be building your brand and some fraction of those people are going to say, wow, I really loved this little story that Lindsay told and there's a link back to her website. I'm going to get to know more about her. So I'm going to go anyway. So I'm a strong believer of tell great stories and it will work out for you in the long run. Just one other comment, which is to the extent that your stories are meant to be vehicles for engagement on your website, then of course they make the most sense being self contained, interesting stories because they're all about engagement.

Then in that case, yeah, that makes sense. One of the things that I think is important to think about is what is the motivation of the platform that is creating these. And for Google the motivation is to have something that is as engaging as possible to keep them around and consuming it. And you see that with YouTube where the way that you perform well on YouTube is to have content that people watch and that keeps them on YouTube. And even if for a while kind of like short teaser type content within stories works where like maybe you get more traffic from it or impressions, it feels like eventually Google's gonna be like that's not what we actually want. We're just not good enough now to realize when it is a teaser and when it's not. And my guess is that over time they would, they would artificially or you know, use the algorithm to make sure that the reach of those aren't as, as high as opposed to something that somebody watches all the way through. They're really engaged with and they would reward that. And that's a little bit of a guess, but you see that kind of over and over with different platforms. One of the things I want to go back to you talked about these three things, traffic, engagement and revenue. I think the revenue piece makes a lot of sense. Kind of working backwards from that. At some point you'll be able to put ads in against these, you'll be able to monetize them. Maybe similar to YouTube, there'll be a Revenue share. I also wouldn't be surprised if you could do like, you know, inject your own ad network or whatever that might be. So still kind of early on that engagement, obviously, it's like you want people to stick around, especially if you have it embedded in your site. It allows people to interact with media in a certain way. The traffic piece, I think is one that's interesting. And there's two different ways that I'm going to go with this. One is talking about the difference between search and Discover. And if we could do that first. And then the second piece is something that's maybe important for people to be aware of. Depending on how they're using Web stories, you might see traffic that's considered traffic to your site, but that's actually web stories impressions, which I want to talk about just so people are aware of it. So let's talk about that idea of Discover versus like a search result right now. For those who aren't familiar, can you talk about what Google Discover is?

Yes. So a lot of people are most familiar with Google as a search engine, of course, which is go to google.com, type something in, or go into your browser and just type a search. Those are all Google search results. You're going to see Google on its mobile devices, in its mobile app. So if you on your phone go and install Google, what you will get is the Google App. And the Google App has. Well, you can just search in the Google App. Its default mode is to show you a feed called the Discover Feedback. And in the Discover feed, it's showing you things that are sort of like a social media feed, things that Google thinks you're just going to be interested in based on your recent viewing and searching experience. And so those might be news stories, or they may be articles from different publications or new web pages that have been published as an option. In the Discover Feedback, you have to actually go into the settings in most cases and turn it on. But if you do turn it on, there will be about one or two pages down in your feed, a horizontal carousel of stories. That carousel, I think currently shows seven or eight stories in a little carousel. And if you click on one of those, it actually right there shows you that story and you can step through that story. And if you keep going, you'll step into the next story and that will be video or images as you know, as story pages telling you that story. So that's your Discover feed. And as I mentioned, you'll have to go into settings to actually turn on to see the Stories feed, if you want to see it inside your Discover feed. I should mention that Google has only turned this on for a subset of countries, which includes the US And a couple of others. So they're still on a rollout plan for Stories. It's pretty new to them. And so we'll see that rollout worldwide quite soon, I think.

Yeah, it's interesting to see kind of where Google is, what they're using as kind of the playground and the beta test or alpha test or whatever you'd want to call it, where you see this happen, where they kind of experiment in certain areas and then maybe roll it out into reach more people or not in this case, I would say, hey, they probably will. And to your point, Google Discover being one of the main areas where that's happening. But also you're starting to see. I can't think of any specific search terms right off the top of my head, but you're starting to see stories pop up in actual search results as well. Can you think of any, do you know of any off the top of your head that like trigger an actual story in search results?

You know, I just did this recently and I found a few, and I'm forgetting as well, we'll put some in the show notes.

Yeah, we can post a couple at.

The bottom of the podcast.

But just to see what it looks like. It's kind of interesting to see how they're starting to include those in the same way that they would do video, where you know that it's a video when you click on it, but in this case it's stories. So my question is, how does that actually, like, how does that actually work from a traffic perspective? So we've talked about it could show up in Discover, it could show up in Search, but when somebody clicks on it, does that register as like, traffic to your site? At what point do you. Are you able to track the impressions around it? How does that translate at that point?

Okay, so when Google created their implementation of this, they built it on top of what they call their AMP platform. That's an acronym standing for Accelerated Mobile Pages. But the idea of that was if you create your web stories according to their specified standard, then when they are showing you a web story inside a Google product, inside Google Search, or inside the Discover feed, they will not be touching your website when they do it. They're going to be. They will have already pulled the data from your website once, and they're feeding it out of a cache on their side when they show it to you in that Way. So the only way in which you know whether they have been displaying your story is that it will show up in Google Web, your Google Web console. They have a specific tab in the Google Web, sorry, Google search Console, that is called Discover. And if you click on that Discover tab, it will show you how often your stories have had an impression, meaning how much they've shown up in a feed and what they call clicks, the number of times that they have showed that story to someone.

Mm. And a click, a click is not a click to your website necessarily a click, is somebody clicking on the story to watch it.

That's exactly right. So that means they're seeing it inside the Google product.

Yep. And it's interesting. I'm, I'm pulling this up for a Pinch of Yum. And you can see it's kind of like old, old days of Facebook where it's like, whoa, big spike here, you know, on Monday, December 21st is big for us. Pinch of Yum had 9,000 clicks and 900,000 impressions. So that means people saw a pinch of yum web story, a story in Discover, probably 90,000 times, clicked on it, you know, essentially 10% of the time, or it was 900,000 times and clicked on it less than that. That would be 1% of the time. But you see this information in Search Console, and what's interesting for me is like, then it kind of drops off in February and like midway through February, we don't have any clicks. And that might have to do with, like us not uploading them as frequently or maybe just stuff not getting surfaced or Google just experimenting in different ways. So how does that click and view of the site translate to an actual impression on the website?

Aha. Okay. So in a web story, the story is self contained, meaning I see the page, I click to the next page, I go all the way through the story. Just like the old Instagram stories, there are ways to get out of the story to somewhere else. In fact, in a web story, they make that much nicer because you can just make clickable things anywhere you want inside the story, and those can link directly back to wherever you want. In your case, they would link back usually to a corresponding page at Pinch of Yum. And so those clicks are clicks from someone being on a Google page or inside a Google app back to opening a webpage on Pinch of Yum. Unfortunately, and I've raised this with the Google folks, they're not very good at telling you how often people are explicitly clicking through from the story to your page. You have to infer that from looking at in your own Google Analytics for your website, that they have arrived on your website and even then they're not very good about giving you referrers to tell you. This one came from the Discover feed. So it is right now still not a great system for giving you the analytics to do that. When we are hosting these stories, we have added a UTM tracking code into the URLs that link back to your own web pages so that you can actually see this is coming because they're clicking on one of those links in one of my stories. But even that's kind of imperfect today, and we're still working on better ways to do that.

Sure.

So for those who aren't familiar, UTM basically is a. A way to communicate to Google where something is coming from. So you're saying if somebody creates a link in Slickstream in a web story, you're automatically adding a utm. So when they open up email services do this as well. When they open up Google Analytics, they can go and they can look and they see. Does it say like Slickstream or Slickstream Stories or what is the UTM category?

Yeah, it's a Slickstream web story, I think it is.

Okay, great. So then they can see, hey, Great, I published 10 web stories. And I know in Google Search Console that I got, you know, 100,000 clicks. Maybe it was a really active month for you and web stories and you had some that kind of went viral on the web stories. But then you'll be able to go into Google Analytics and say of those hundred thousand clicks on the web stories, you know, maybe 5,000 of those actually clicked over to go to my site. So you can start to see the different steps along the way. And you can also see to your earlier point, it might be less about thinking, how do I just get people to my site? And more about thinking, how do I make my brand as prevalent as possible on all of the different platforms, one of which would be Google in the form of stories. Can you talk about something that came up that's a little bit of a bummer for the accuracy of analytics? For anybody who is, at least last time that I knew, using the Google Web Stories plugin. So you can do this in slickstream. Slickstream will host the videos, but you can also do it using the Google Web Stories plugin and kind of edit and publish in the same way. Two things with that. Number one, you are then hosting them on your own site so much like you would an image. But in this instance, it's video, which is like very bandwidth heavy. So just kind of a little tacking on a yellow flag to that. But two, there's also some implications, as far as I understand, around the impact of your actual Google Analytics stats if you are hosting those on your own site. Is that right?

That's correct. So inside every webpage on your site today, or on most sites today, is a Google Analytics tracking code. And that means that every time someone loads that page, an event fires off to Google Analytics. And that's how all that data comes about. When you look at your own Google Analytics Dashboard, it turns out that for web stories, a web story is a web page. It has its own URL, and in fact, it has a tracking code on it as well.

So in the Google Web Story plugin, there's a setting where you fill in your Google Analytics tracking code and they will use that as they create the webpage, which is that story for you. The trouble is, if you use the same tracking code that you normally do for the rest of your website, that means that every time anyone sees a web story, it looks to your Google Analytics like that is another hit on your website and it is in some sense strictly true. Someone has loaded one of your web stories, which is like loading a webpage. But I think for a lot of publishers, that will be very confusing because by their nature, the web stories themselves don't have ads on them. So if you are looking at your RPMs for advertising, for example, you're going to see a lot of potential web page hits, but you won't see any advertising that goes with those because there's no ads on the web, on the web stories themselves. So one really easy option for that is to simply not populate the Google Analytics tracking code in the Google Web Stories plugin, if you want to avoid that confusion. Or another option is to go into Google Analytics and to set up a filter so that it's explicitly putting those page views for your web stories into a different category or leaving them out entirely.

Yeah, it's one of the things that I think most folks wouldn't think about, but that's nice with Google Analytics is they have the different kind of the hierarchy of your plans. You have an account and then you have a property and app, and then you have a view within each one of those. But if you create a new property, you could have that just be web stories, and then you'll get a new unique Google Analytics ID that you could drop in there. So then you can get all that data and it won't mess with the property stats for your. For your actual site. So for those who are using the Google Web Stories plugin, two things that would be important to point out with that. Number one is the fact that you're hosting it on your own website and your own hosting. And still to be determined, you know, especially if you have something go viral, what that looks like in terms of bandwidth usage, I'm not familiar with that, but something to be aware of. And then to that Google Analytics code there for Slickstream, it's different. You're hosting all of that on your own and in turn paying for all of the associated costs that go with hosting the video and serving the video. So for people who use slickstream, they don't need to worry about any of the Google Analytics stuff, Is that right?

Yeah. So this is a part that warrants just a minute or two. Slickstream, for the services we provide to our customers today, we have this product which is called our engagement suite, and we have enhanced that product to do search and content discovery, like our film strips that show recommended content and so forth. All those features are just part of our standard product. And we've enhanced those now so that if your site has web stories, we can do a nice job of highlighting those web stories inside your website. And this is a part of which Google is extremely excited about, because they really would like to see the web adopt web stories in a big way. And they think that having web stories deeply integrated into websites is really valuable. And so that's why they've partnered with us. So we're helping in terms of wherever those web stories are hosted, if they're your web stories, we're making it really easy for you to highlight them inside your own site. For example, we have a widget you can place on your homepage, which is a beautiful carousel of all of your stories. And we can add a widget that gives you a new page on your website, which is a place to look through all of the stories you have. And we have widgets for embedding your stories inside your posts, if you'd like to have the associated story. So we do all of that as our part of our standard product. And those could be stories that Google that you created using Google's plugin, or they could be stories created with some other third party, because since stories are standard, anybody can create and host these stories. Then there's a separate thing. And we created a thing called Slickstream Stories because we were hearing from a lot of our customers just what you said, Bjork. Which is, hey, I like these stories, but I'm scared to death of hosting them and all that video content on my own domain, that if my server is already underpowered and it's now going to have to serve up all this video, that's a big problem for me. Also, we've heard a lot of complaints that people find the Google Web Story plugin as an authoring tool. It's beautiful, but it's extremely complicated. We created Slickstream Stories, which is a separate product. It's a place where you can go and it's very similar. It's in the web, but it's very similar to how Instagram Stories are created. Much simpler and it's very lightweight. We do all the hosting of the content itself out of our own servers, so you never have to worry about that. This product is still in beta, although we've now got, I think, 100 different customers that are using that product now, and we're hosting their stories for them. Those stories that we're hosting can be used just alongside, mix and match with stories that you create using Google's plugin as well. There are those two pieces of it, and we're trying to help on both sides.

Great. Yeah, that's awesome. The authoring experience being such an important thing, because if it's a clunky, difficult experience, you're going to be less likely to do it. So if you are interested in doing it, my encouragement would be to find the path of least resistance and know that you guys do a great job with that. I could jam on this stuff forever, Kingston. But I suppose at some point we need to put a bow on it. A good kind of next step for folks I think would who are interested would either be to check out Slickstream if you haven't yet, or to check out that event that you're doing with Google. Could you just plug that one more time and also let folks know if they do want to check out slickstream and learn a little bit more where they can go?

Yeah. So start at www.slickstream.com, that's our main.

Homepage and you'll learn a little bit about our main products.

And if you are interested in this upcoming event related specifically to web stories that we're doing in concert with Google, go to the events page and you can sign up there to make sure you're counted in.

Awesome. Kingston, as always, really great to chat. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Really enjoyed it. Bjork, talk to you soon.

That's a wrap for this episode, Kingston. Thank you so much for coming on, and it's been great to see Slickstream before building through the years, and also for us to benefit from that as a creator publisher. Really appreciate all the work that you and your team are doing on Slickstream. If you want to check out any of the show notes at any time, go to foodbloggerpro.com podcast we have all of the podcasts there. You can easily search through all of the old archives and see all the additional resources that we wrap around each one of these audio files, so be sure to check those out if you want to dig a little bit deeper. And we appreciate you and tuning in every week. We wouldn't be able to do this podcast without you. That's a wrap. Make it a great week. Thanks.