TL; DR With millions of Covid19 cases worldwide, stock market volatility, and billions of people under stay at home orders, this pandemic creates threats and opportunities for humanity. With great gratitude, Hacker Noon keeps humming along. We’ve always been an entirely remote team, and we like our position as a digital source of knowledge in time when people are spending as much time as ever reading online. We’ll dig into how our business is making adaptations for the pandemic, but our overall strategy remains unchanged. Hacker Noon publishes insightful stories, makes useful software, and just is This quarter was strong and steady at 3.4M+ words published (+5% 2019 average), 4.5M+ monthly readers (+12% 2019 average) and redacted in revenue (+42% above 2019 quarterly average). how hackers start their afternoons. Product Experience We’re focused on making a better place for technologists to read, write and publish. Our big release of the quarter was dubbed NextGreen: a redesign and re-architecture built with the NextJS framework on the story page, homepage, search page and tagged page. The story page is where the vast majority of our traffic lives, and while we’ve been testing the new design work live for the last three weeks on production, average time on page is up 14% on the story page. Almost as importantly, this new architecture streamlines deployment across our CDN, cloud functions and application, so future iterations can deploy significantly faster. More Product Initiatives that were made live this quarter: Ad by Tag Needle: Revenue Example: #java Notes: Ad placement relevancy to content. Early returns: First couple Beta payings customers are live. Bugs worked out. Story Scheduling Needle: Words Published Example: story Notes: Optimizing the rate of publishing. Early returns: Average stories published per day is 29. This helps keep the editors sane. Commenting Evolution Needle: Words Published Example: Scroll down to end of a story Notes: Integrated Disqus and added our own custom emojis Early returns: More learnings about what social proof matters. Deeper Algolia Integration Needle: Time Reading Example: Search anything on site Notes: Rich media data  for stories on all curation pages and filters  on the search page Early returns: More value for curation decisions Product Initiatives that are currently in alpha and beta: Collections Needle: Time Reading Example: HN top stories Notes: Curated reading lists from Hacker Noon & around the web Noonies V2 Needle: Revenue Example: The Noonies Notes: Iterate on last year’s custom voting app Web Monetization Needle: Words Published Example: site source code Notes: Real time streaming payments from readers to writers to charities Collaborative Editing V1 Needle: Words Published Example: story Notes: Unlisted draft links & in talks to white label markup.io Subscriptions V1 Needle - Time Reading Example - n/a Notes - Logic to subscribe to tags and authors We did , partnering with GUN decentralized peer to peer database. It is not ready to deploy to all users, so we are exploring multiple approaches to micro-content hosting and curation within . GUN is still providing page load performance insights. Curious about how text hosting evolves over time. run a beta experiment hosting annotations and inline comments on a blockchain our user facing experience We also did experience some spammy visitors - so that was a fun cat and mouse game that resulted in more spam prevention implementations. Lots of free roblox codes. New users now earn writer functionality, like after they spend time reading and writing. Spam management never ends, it’s part of running a large community, and now our system has a bit more protection baked in. profile advertisements, In the long term, we have a lot of options to be a better place for technologists to read, write, and publish. Once Hacker Noon the site is a profitable growth machine, we could explore questions like, how is it possible to use our software to serve more of the internet? Additionally, we remain excited about the creation of token generated by time reading created. But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. In the short term, As our site is historically about 75% desktop and 25% mobile readership - and other many text content destinations (especially in tech)  are closer to 50% desktop and 50% mobile - we are likely to move our attention to a mobile application later in the year. But we do operate with the . our product team is iterating on how curation works (collections and reactions), improving the writer experience (text editor interactions and human editor interactions), and building out the reader account experience (subscriptions and recommendations). product funnel approach Editorial Experience Redacted We published 2,200 stories for the quarter. You can view the list of our best stories (3.37% of all stories) curated by editors . We also have put gasoline on stories of the time, publishing (and rejecting about 350 more), besides our regular powerful topics, namely , , and . here 175 Coronavirus /Covid-19 stories programming python cryptocurrency stories , mostly our cryptocurrency news. We’ll be monitoring this source, but it is a solid win for amplifying the publish button, as Google News has ≈ users. Some of top recent mentions around the web are , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and other places around the web. Google News started picking up Hacker Noon stories in late February 630M+ Mercedes Benz commercial Wired Forbes book citations Investor Place Media Post Cornell Yale International Business Times Yahoo Finance Bitcoin Exchange Guide ZDNet BizCommunity NewsMax Crypto Slate Crypto Daily Security Boulevard Hacker Earth Decrypt UPenn Law School Seeking Alpha Value Walk Dice IFL Science ProductHunt Cointelegraph Coindesk Bitcoinist Thrive Global Bitcoin.com GeekWire Redacted We have further steered into the “ugly-highlighter-pixelated-terminal green” for our pixelated presence on incumbent social media platforms. We are creating and distributing more micro-content. In Q1 2020, not only did we continue to expand on current strong platforms such as on (where we gained a “verified” checkmark), (where we have not gained a verified checkmark), (where we post podcast episodes and software updates) or (where they say we have ), (with almost 400k monthly views exclusively from RSS repost), or (it’s very green); but also on younger platforms, such as (with 5.3M views across 80 GIFs), (42k subscribers), and (817k views and 2k downloads). Facebook Twitter Youtube LinkedIn 200+ ‘employees’ Pinterest Instagram Giphy Minds Unsplash Revenue Our in revenue was 42% higher than the average quarter in 2019, but a 6% decline from 2019 Q4, which was the highest in company history. Advertising is highly seasonal and even in growing businesses, Q1 is often less than Q4 of the prior year. continued to lead the way, overperformed, and we made a big move into ad placement by content relevancy with the beta launch of . redacted Top navigation brand as author our ad by tag program Redacted At Hacker Noon, we’ve also been building better tech for the . For the prospective & current customers, we’ve automated our internal publishing flow. For any lead that visits our sponsor page, we also introduced . sponsorship experience brand as author our own sales chatbot We have also started to open our , with Sentry & NORDVPN as beta customers.  As mentioned above, it’s our first ad placement by content relevancy (example of ). Ad by Tag beta program Sentry on the Javascript page Redacted While the entire economy is subject to this global downturn, the effect of the bottom-line was not massive to ours: there was one delayed customer payment and a dozen or so leads dropping, citing budget constraints. However, we continue to benefit from increased marketing budgets from online education and knowledge based companies, such as our new customers Udacity and Udemy. Also, a lot of event marketing budgets have opened up, and how tech companies driving tech people to online events could grow. I think tech companies marketing budgets will not shrink like other industries’ budgets, but who knows? What we control is how we make a better sales machine. Profit and Loss Redacted Redacted Jobs In growing our team, we plan to continue what has worked, hire for part time project/s, with the plan to consider each person for full-time. Our next three roles this year are Head of Story Recruitment, Sales Representative, and T-shaped Backend Developer. if you have a candidate in mind. Email us Outlook Don’t forget to wash your hands :-)

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State Of The Noonion Q2 2020: Building The Noonies 2.0, Mozilla Grant, And More

State Of The Noonion Q4 2019: On Dark Mode, Integration With Unsplash and GUN

everything you need to know about Hacker Noon 💚

everything you need to know about HackerNoon 💚

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State Of The Noonion Q1 2020: Progress In Spite Of COVID-19

State Of The Noonion Q1 2020: Progress In Spite Of COVID-19

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