Memeja Iteration

In the past week, we've found that people really love viewing rage comics. Bounce rate for new visitors is quite low (~10-20% - we think the variance is influenced by the quality of the front-page stories).

We're following up with a second, fascinating question: if people love viewing rage comics, why aren't people creating more of them? We realize that viewing always surpasses creation but it's rational to wonder why this hasn't been done before.

(1)

So like good entrepreneurs, we are going out to engage our users and ask them for their opinions why. We've learned in the past that what users say about themselves does not exactly coincide with what they do. But this still provides us a cursory understanding of user mentality.

Berkeley was on Veteran's Day holiday, but we thought we could still catch a number of students and continue to market. What we found is that 7 out of 11 students had seen rage comics before. 6 out of 7 had never tried to create. It's a small sample size but already interesting to think about. We know that rage comic creation is degrees more difficult to create than macromemes -- but is it the difficult mechanics of creation or the difficulty of imagining a story?

Max: I asked [a student] his thoughts on the current editor and said it was okay, I asked him if he would likely make more if there were an easier editor and he said "maybe, it's more about having a story I think is good enough to share than the process of making it"

So if that's the barrier to creating rage comics, we have a host of interesting ideas to pursue: perhaps by creating a social context, people will be able to create stories more easily. In other words, as with the original Memeja idea, if we have an 'album' together that already represents an experience, that makes it easier for people to think of stories within that experience context.


(2)

The second experiment we're conducting is based on the idea that people already know what rage comics are. We printed a different flyer that had a funny Berkeley rage comic on it. Essentially, we're split-testing the different flyers to see which has a better ROI.

It'll be interesting to see if more users come because of the rage comic flyer. If so, that may say something else again about how much people like rage comics.