GirlsChaseTV Feedback

[Protean]

So GirlschaseTV just launched and not seeing a feedback thread yet I went ahead and created one.

As a quick aside I'm glad GC is making this move. YouTube has long been the defacto place to host video on the web, but has the platform gets more and more restrictive, censored, optimized for "engagement" rather than user experience (*cough* disabling the dislike counter *cough*) I think those looking to make video content of all types should strongly consider breaking off onto they're own platforms like this. Hopefully my feedback will play a small role in making GCTV that much better.

With that out of the way let's get into what I didn't like about the platform first:

1. I'm kinda unsure of what GCTV is exactly. A cursory glance makes it look like it's exactly like YouTube which implies that any schmuck could make an account and post videos. I went into the site thinking it was a video version of the girlschase blog, where different contributors there, could post videos whenever they felt a live presentation is preferable to a written one. I mean come on @Chase, don't you find it a little weird asking people to hit subscribe on a video you posted on your own platform? It may just be my expectations not matching what you were going for, but that's just how things looked to me on first blush.
2. The search could use a little more tuning. For example I searched "beginners" hoping to find Hector's series on the biggest beginner problems and got no results. Searching beginner gets the results that I'm looking for, but people coming in are going to be used to a search that's smarter than that and it could lead to frustration down the road. Also I don't really like having be search queries, prepended by the hashtag/pound (#) symbol. For me a general search is distinct from a tag search and having those two things mixed up is a bit confusing. ALSO, and I just tired this, clicking on the tag in the video description takes you to the search page and automatically searches the tag. This is fine, but not getting any results once it searches isn't ideal for obvious reasons. I clicked the beginners tips tag on part one of the Biggest Beginner Problems video and the subsequent search yielded no results.
3. The mobile experience could use some work. I mostly browse the web on my laptop, but just over 50% of web traffic is from mobile so it's imperative that the mobile experience is up to snuff. Right now the major two gripes I've seen are the video player not allowing you to pause a video until you enable sound, and the video description not working (you hit show more and the description box does not expand). There also a couple styling bugs here and there. In all, while none of the bugs break the site, it's kinda a death-by-a-thousand-cuts experience with some of the rough edges

Here's what I think went well and you should double down on

1. First, I really enjoyed your presentation style on your videos @Chase. I feel like they were a pretty good translation from the writing style on your own site. If I were running things, I'd suggest that every contributor shoot your videos like you did (standing directly in front of the camera with semi-frequent cuts to stock B-roll and graphics for points of emphasis). I know there may be some challenges with that as contributors are based all over the place, but a consistent video style regardless of who is presenting will make it obvious you're watching a GirlsChaseTV video and not a video that was supposed to be on YouTube.
2. On the technical side of things, good job with the video player. The old video player you had for some of you courses left a bit to be desired, so the improvement here is a welcome one
3. Generally things are loading quickly and videos don't really buffer even when I raise the quality. Now I do have fast internet so take this with a grain of salt, but my experience there has been fantastic.

And that's gonna be it from me. To summarize I think the main criticism (outside of the bug fixes) is what GirlsChaseTV wants to be? Right now I'm seeing this weird YouTube clone where I want to see girlschase.com/videos if that makes sense. Still regardless of what road you take it down, I really crossing my fingers for your success on this venture, man. Building out video hosting and streaming is NOT easy, so the fact that you've gotten this far alone is commendable and gets my respect (for what that's worth lol).

Mods feel free to move this thread to a more appropriate board if need be and other posters provide feedback if you can. When you're building a product, early stage feedback like this is worth it's weight in gold.

- Protean

 

[Chase]

@Protean,

Thanks for the feedback. This is all great stuff. I really appreciate it -- good feedback can be hard to come by.

As a quick aside I'm glad GC is making this move. YouTube has long been the defacto place to host video on the web, but has the platform gets more and more restrictive, censored, optimized for "engagement" rather than user experience (*cough* disabling the dislike counter *cough*) I think those looking to make video content of all types should strongly consider breaking off onto they're own platforms like this. Hopefully my feedback will play a small role in making GCTV that much better.

Yeah, the plan was to start now and work out the kinks, that way by the time we really need it it's already set.

Still plenty of kinks to work out though, as you've seen!

I'm kinda unsure of what GCTV is exactly. A cursory glance makes it look like it's exactly like YouTube which implies that any schmuck could make an account and post videos. I went into the site thinking it was a video version of the girlschase blog, where different contributors there, could post videos whenever they felt a live presentation is preferable to a written one. I mean come on @Chase, don't you find it a little weird asking people to hit subscribe on a video you posted on your own platform? It may just be my expectations not matching what you were going for, but that's just how things looked to me on first blush.

Yeah, it's a bit silly asking to like and subscribe on my own platform, huh. I think I may have cut that out in the latest videos I recorded but there's a bunch on there with it.

That's an excellent point on it not really being clear what the site is. That's a great point. Probably we need to do some site design so that we are telling people what the site is and how to use it on the homepage. Should also probably have some things on the video pages that help people landing on those get oriented.

The search could use a little more tuning. For example I searched "beginners" hoping to find Hector's series on the biggest beginner problems and got no results. Searching beginner gets the results that I'm looking for, but people coming in are going to be used to a search that's smarter than that and it could lead to frustration down the road. Also I don't really like having be search queries, prepended by the hashtag/pound (#) symbol. For me a general search is distinct from a tag search and having those two things mixed up is a bit confusing. ALSO, and I just tired this, clicking on the tag in the video description takes you to the search page and automatically searches the tag. This is fine, but not getting any results once it searches isn't ideal for obvious reasons. I clicked the beginners tips tag on part one of the Biggest Beginner Problems video and the subsequent search yielded no results.

Good find. I had not been paying attention to search. Just checked and, yeah, the search works awful.

We'll have to look into adding elastic search there -- would make a big difference in how results show up.

The mobile experience could use some work. I mostly browse the web on my laptop, but just over 50% of web traffic is from mobile so it's imperative that the mobile experience is up to snuff. Right now the major two gripes I've seen are the video player not allowing you to pause a video until you enable sound, and the video description not working (you hit show more and the description box does not expand). There also a couple styling bugs here and there. In all, while none of the bugs break the site, it's kinda a death-by-a-thousand-cuts experience with some of the rough edges

Yes, and it's over 80% for Girls Chase. Nobody uses computers anymore... except for the folks who are making the sites and content.

I'll make a note on these issues and review it with a fine-toothed comb for mobile styling bugs and other issues so we can get those fixed.

If the site takes off I'd like to do an app version for it eventually... but we'd probably need to hit 1000 paid subscribers before I'll commit to that. That's a good ways off right now.

Here's what I think went well and you should double down on

1. First, I really enjoyed your presentation style on your videos @Chase. I feel like they were a pretty good translation from the writing style on your own site. If I were running things, I'd suggest that every contributor shoot your videos like you did (standing directly in front of the camera with semi-frequent cuts to stock B-roll and graphics for points of emphasis). I know there may be some challenges with that as contributors are based all over the place, but a consistent video style regardless of who is presenting will make it obvious you're watching a GirlsChaseTV video and not a video that was supposed to be on YouTube.

That's interesting feedback.

I'm happy to hear you like the way I present my videos.

I'll have a think about asking Hector and future contributors to do theirs the same way.

There are some challenges for that considering how we want to grow the platform... once our traffic and subscribers are at a decent level I'd like to start getting other guys on the platform who are producing good content, with them getting paid based on their Premium video views, but also able to invite subscribers to their channels to visit their sites / sign up for their offers, etc. I think that'll be an important part of helping the site grow, just getting other guys on there, who are then promoting their GC TV channels other places, bringing more traffic to the site.

The flip side of that is while we can screen creators for the quality of their content before setting them up with a creator account, it's a lot harder to control the way they produce their content.

I can make recommendations to them, though!

On the technical side of things, good job with the video player. The old video player you had for some of you courses left a bit to be desired, so the improvement here is a welcome one

Generally things are loading quickly and videos don't really buffer even when I raise the quality. Now I do have fast internet so take this with a grain of salt, but my experience there has been fantastic.

That's wonderful to hear.

We had big problems getting the player to work well early on. A lot of loading issues and slow videos. It was a major headache.

We've been developing a custom player in-house for the membership site. Hopefully within a couple of months we'll have that updated too.

And that's gonna be it from me. To summarize I think the main criticism (outside of the bug fixes) is what GirlsChaseTV wants to be? Right now I'm seeing this weird YouTube clone where I want to see girlschase.com/videos if that makes sense. Still regardless of what road you take it down, I really crossing my fingers for your success on this venture, man. Building out video hosting and streaming is NOT easy, so the fact that you've gotten this far alone is commendable and gets my respect (for what that's worth lol).

That's good criticism.

Overhauling the site look and feel and making it clearer what the site is is not really a totally huge amount of work.

I'll have a think on what we need to do to position the site properly and we'll look at making some changes as we move it from alpha to beta (technology, not manosphere ).

Chase

 

[Starboy]

I wanted to chime in and share a few thoughts. This is a personal feature i'd like and not something that you guys have to strongly consider if it's too much of a hassle to incorporate ,but i'd like if there was a way to increase the playback speed. Especially if they're long videos I find it better for the sake of time if I can watch them at 1.25 speed or 1.5 speed even depending. Sitting through a 20 to 25 minute video is kinda tough for guys with a short attention span and if I could cut that down by 5 minutes that would be useful. Also timestamps like in the youtube videos.

I think protean mentioned that finding specific videos is a bit awkward with the hashtags. It would be nice if there was an archive of all the videos and they were categorized into different sections like tactics,mindsets,female psychology,relationships etc kinda like on the main blog.

With regards to the purpose of the website and how you plan to grow it there's also the question of how motivated will people be to stay subscribed. There's a lot of videos on there that was already uploaded to the main channel and might be on there currently.

There are a handful of videos exclusive to the website and some of them are made by you which is cool cuz we can see you illustrate concepts instead of trying to interpret your articles which lack certain elements of clarity. However if we watch all the premium videos that you guys uploaded what incentive would we have to stay subbed if we saw everything we wanted? It kinda reminds me of the disney plus subscription which when it first came out people also had a similiar concern since majority of the content on there was marvel movies and kids shows that people mostly watched. They're adding some disney exclusive shows over time to give people a reason to stay subbed.

Do you guys plan to upload new videos regularly every month covering concepts that are new or maybe go more in depth on topics written about,but instead are able to offer a clearer concise explanation? Maybe you could have a subscribers livestream every month where people can ask specific questions and have them get answered.

These are my thoughts. I think it's cool you guys have your own platform. Even if it's not profitable longterm being able to avoid censorship and scrutiny is a great perk. Having a space to discuss what you want freely without sharing it without having to deal trolls and queer sjws like this one

 

[Rain]

Hey @Chase

I've watched some of them like how to go out and cold approach and a few others. Do you wear any.... you know makeup, or tinted moisturiser, or emollients or anything like that or is it 100% natural that's you? And the way you are in the video, is that what you look like when you do cold approach daytime or do you ever wear more or less makeup/skin products (on the face) in comparison to the video?
I noticed theres a little bit of redness in your skintone but I wasn't sure if that was your natural look or not.
Cheers.

 

[James Cruse]

Hey @Chase

I have sent you an e-mail regarding GirlschaseTV. My username is in the e-mail Title.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers