News and Updates

How is it February already?

January just flew right on by here at Slickstream, with well over 100 new websites signing up for our Engagement Suite and a whole heap of new records broken. One of those records was for total favorites (over 5,000,000 in a single month!), and to celebrate we decided to take a closer look at the content that visitors loved so much.

So without further ado, here are some of our 'favorite' things from January:

What a year.

Slickstream started 2019 as a fledgling startup serving a handful of food blogs, and closed it with our biggest month ever: 100,000,000 pageviews in December alone.

Slickstream CEO Kingston Duffie was featured on Tuesday by our friends at Food Blogger Pro in their weekly podcast.

In a wide ranging interview with Bjork Ostrom, Kingston discusses the importance of on-site engagement, the lessons he's learned from his past companies, and why he's so excited about Slickstream.

You can listen to the whole thing here, but we also want to share some of our favorite excerpts:

November was a record month here at Slickstream, and we wanted to share a few major milestones we hit along the way.

While the Slickstream Engagement Suite works on just about any site, there's one group of publishers that have taken to us faster than the rest: food bloggers.

Here at Slickstream, we offer you a lot of options to increase your on-site engagement. Our search, discovery, and engagement tools are designed to blend seamlessly with your website, and to help users intuitively find more of your content. But how can you tell if they're working?

That's where our analytics come in. Up until this point, these analytics have been kept in beta while we identified what was useful, what wasn't, and how best to display everything. As of today, we're excited to announce that they're ready for a full release!

Here's what's new:

One of the key components of Slickstream's Engagement Suite is its Heartbeat/Favorites tool, which you may recognize as the heart icon that sits above search in the bottom right corner of Slickstream-enabled websites.

It's one of our most-used tools (particularly on mobile) and it serves two valuable purposes for publishers:

• First, it enables visitors to effortlessly express their appreciation on posts, and engages them with live animations as visitors from around the world do the same.
• Second, it provides those visitors with an easy method to save content and refer back to it later on a personal 'Favorites' page, without having to log in or enter an email address.

Today we've made an update which we think improve both its look and feel and its overall functionality. Users can now access their favorites from the Heartbeat module itself, via a simple and intuitive bookmark icon that appears after clicking.

Here at Slickstream, we have two top priorities that guide everything we do:

1. Creating a better user experience for your website's visitors
2. Increasing the actual engagement on your site

The first point is easy to see, and our feedback from happy customers speaks for itself. But measuring increased engagement is a little trickier, which is why we were so happy when our friends at Pinch of Yum volunteered to open up their site for some thorough testing.

Well the results are in, and we're absolutely thrilled. We'll dive into the details below, but here's the short version: in one week of analysis, our Engagement Suite increased total clicks 17.6%, led to 489 additional hours of on-site activity, and raised pageviews and revenue 2.2%!

Let's dive into the details below.

If there's one question we get all the time from our customers, it's "How is Slickstream going to affect my site speed?"

Frankly, it's an excellent question. I don't have to tell you how important site speed is to publishers — it has a huge impact on both advertising revenue and visitor satisfaction.

So we decided to dive into the numbers on what actually happens when you add the Slickstream Engagement Suite to your website. I'll get to that below, but first it's important to explain how we work and what the most important metrics to focus on are.

Search, Discover, and Engage with Slickstream

Hi everyone, and welcome to Slickstream! We're a startup with a simple mission: To help publishers create exceptional user experiences and maximize their visitor engagement.

Why engagement? Well, there are a handful of reasons.

1. It's valuable. Publishers generate revenue from serving advertisements, and the more pageviews they get the more ads they can serve. But increasing pageviews isn't just about acquiring new visitors — it's also about increasing the amount of time existing visitors spend on site, and the amount of content they consume. That's where we come in.
2. It's underserved. While there are countless products on the acquisition side (think SEO, social media, campaign management, etc.), there are very few that help publishers actually increase their on-site performance metrics. Our Engagement Suite product was built to do just that, by offering tools to help users Search, Discover, and Engage with content.
3. It's the whole point! Publishers don't create content in a vacuum; they create it for their audience to consume. Our users put their hearts and souls into their websites, and we help them make the most of their hard work. You can read for yourself how they feel about it (spoiler: they're big fans).