The Glimcap Part 8

Hello Glimesh! Welcome to week 8 of the Glimcap. This week has been a tough week for growth, and a good week for stability. While we have had some ups and downs, we have a plan of action moving forward, and it’s this plan that we’ll be focusing on this week.

Glimesh’s Growth

This WeekLast WeekDiff
Discord6,2436,25916⬇
Twitter9,1009,05743⬆
Reddit55253517⬆
Instagram1,1501,13614⬆
Facebook56954524⬆
Users35,97734,8931,084⬆
Apps58957118⬆
MRR$10,005$9,780$225⬆
Support Tickets*45238765⬆

Last week has probably been the slowest week for growth since the project began. This is because since launch we have been pretty quiet on social media while we worked on getting the website as stable as possible, so this wasn’t entirely outside of the plan, but we are now going to look to move into a stage of growth, more on that in wins.

Traffic

Our traffic has been going down a little bit since we’ve been a bit quieter on social media. But now that we’ve tackled some of the bugs we are ready to get into full swing.

Gaming is our most popular page beyond the home page, and our average users are spending 6 minutes on the site. This is an average of anyone who might sit and stream for sometime to someone who just clicks on the site and immediately leaves.

We were down 15% on our Tweet activity but even then we had impressions coming in at 1.9 million and a pretty healthy number of Profile visits. Even though we may have been Tweeting a bit less, the love from the community still shows how much you all were sharing us.

Bandwidth

This is 3 days worth of bandwidth as we did a change recently which will allow us to track more days, allowing us to allocate servers more efficiently as we continue to grow. The data going up is roughly relative to the amount of bandwidth that streamers are using, while the data going down is relative to the amount of bandwidth that viewers are consuming.

Financials

These financials are an overview of the past 7 days, MMR is monthly recurring revenue which includes both channel and platform subs. Channel subscriptions take up about 60% of that and platform subscriptions are about 40% of that.

Channel subscriptions are growing nicely which is great to see as it not only supports us, but also the streamers! We had 115 new subscribers this week as well, the more the merrier!

Mar 1st-21st Glimesh Server Budget
Gross$9,945.00
Payouts$2,343.38
Revenue$6,780.29
DO Credits$8,042.78
DO Infra$1,773.53
DO Bandwidth$2,050.76
DO Expenses$3,824.29
Remaining Credits$4,218.49
“Budget” Remaining$2,955.45
Actual Remaining$6,780.29

The server budget allows us to understand how much the servers are costing us vs. what we are bringing back in, whilst we had some free credits with Digital Ocean these are now running out. While we are still in the green and can still exist, the budget number has decreased since last week - which means the money we are bringing in from subscriptions isn’t enough to cover the server costs and other additional funds in the future (employees, advertising, and other such things) so we need to start moving round some priorities.

We want to start shifting our priorities over to marketing now and growing the site. This will help us to start earning more revenue to help further develop the service. This isn’t a call for more money or investors but we are now actively setting our sights to begin actively campaigning the site to bring in more streamers to the platform.

Wins

This week’s wins are pretty varied so let’s get to it!

Marketing Plans

Talks of marketing plans have begun this week and while there is more to come, we have currently have events in the works starting this Monday with some educational topics on Streaming with Glimesh.

You can see below some of the planned events that we have going on, including some informational events about Glimesh, Streamer Highlights, and more ideas to come. We will be using content these events to help share and promote Glimesh on social media. Our goal going forward is to really start getting people more interested and aware of what is going on here at Glimesh. We will continue to work on viewer improvements and streaming improvements but we feel that we are ready to really start getting the servers going with more streamers and more content being made on Glimesh.

Website Wins

Subcategories are launching soon. This will allow you to refine the content of your stream more effectively. For example for those in the tech category, you will be able to add a subcategory like programming for example. For those in gaming the sub category will be your game title. Not only does this allow you to open your tags up to be a reflection of you and your community in a more relaxed way, but it also allows the viewers to be able to refine the content they want to see easier. Be on the lookout in #site-updates on the Discord for when this launches.

Database performance has been improved this week with the switch up to unnamed statements. This will make things more scalable as the website continues to grow.

GCT Wins

Mja has been working on helping the GCT to navigate reports easier with a new chat log function for individual users. This means that if someone is spamming multiple channels the GCT can now check the user chat logs directly to verify this all at once, instead of needing to check individual channel chat logs. This will help us speed up the rate of response from the GCT to these matters.

Streamers which were globally banned were still able to chat in their own channel chats. This has now been fixed and can no longer happen, so once you are globally banned you will be entirely unable to interact, immediately.

New internal documentation for the GCT has been launched this week which helps to solidify the processes around moderation and enforcement to help make all decisions consistent across the board no matter which member of the team deals with it.

FTL Wins

This week Dan has been working hard on a whole host of future fixes for FTL, including streams being choppy, or not being marked as live, or even appearing as live while you are offline. The problem seems to be tied to not all network equipment enjoying when a lot of video packets are being pushed through. The changes Dan is making are for the FTL-SDK that OBS uses to send all the information to our servers, the current SDK is built on the information from Microsoft and Beam so needs a little attention to get up to modern standards. Once this is up and running it will be merged with OBS directly to work for everyone. You can see an example below of some of the work Dan has been doing with the FTL-SDK.

Some additional stability improvements have also been deployed to FTL ingest and edge nodes this week to add some additional fixes for when streams are not appearing live.

Another big win which will help us going forward with FTL is the development of a more automated testing system to help identify issues earlier and reduce regression. This will hopefully lead to issues being caught much earlier on in the development process, stopping them before they get passed on to you all.

Challenges

Growth is a challenge we are facing head on and as already mentioned earlier we are now beginning to tackle as we start our marketing strategy and push our social media more to get the word out there.

Persistent bugs

There are fixes planned for all of these bugs, but some are taking a little more time than others due to them proving elusive and hard to reproduce. We may have a potential fix for the chat scrolling so keep an eye out if you still see this bug.

  • Chat scrolling
  • Streams ‘going offline’
  • Not showing up as live

Tag system

People are struggling to find the right type of content, tags are being placed incorrectly. We are hopeful our new subcategory system will help work some of these issues out.

  • Multiple game tags
  • Tags in the wrong area
  • Confusing UI

What’s next?

Our current focus is on improving subcategories, tags and FTL stability however, we haven’t forgotten about phases 2 and 3 of our alpha roadmap and we will begin working on these soon, but before we do, we are going to be opening the floor to the community as we look to reprioritise the features laid out in these phases - but please note, phase 2 is not in the immediate future for us right now, a date is still to be determined while we polish up phase 1.

GlimFact of the week

Glimesh has launched to everyone regardless of who you are for Alpha Phase 1, which may be why you notice some features you may be used to not appearing on our platform. Most Alpha phases happen behind closed doors / are restricted to a small testing group. Here at Glimesh we decided to do things a little differently because the best feedback and way to catch bugs and issues is to let everyone test the servers!

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