From an expensive video idea to a more sustainable photography platform

The project that became ClickASnap started as Videscape, an ambitious idea described as a cross between YouTube and Facebook. Rather than committing heavily to the full concept before we knew whether the underlying model worked, Marc Thornton recommended building a smaller working version first.

That prototype was deliberately real enough to expose the important problems. It included video upload and transcoding, streaming infrastructure, pre-roll advertising and, later, a model that shared advertising revenue with creators when their videos were watched.

Technically, the product worked. It also started to attract a community. The more useful discovery, however, came from the economics.

Video is expensive to process, store and deliver. Advertising revenue also varies significantly depending on audience scale, territory and access to higher-value advertising networks. Those two realities collided when a long-form video went viral. The platform suddenly had to serve a very large amount of video, but much of the traffic came from territories generating little or no eligible advertising revenue. The creator still had to be paid under the revenue-share model.

What looked like a breakthrough in audience terms became the clearest evidence that the model was unsustainable at the scale available to us.

Instead of treating the prototype as a failed project, we looked at what it had proved and what could be reused. There was a functioning platform, a codebase, product mechanics and an emerging community. The expensive part was the medium itself.

The recommendation was to pivot from video to photography. Images removed most of the transcoding and streaming burden, reduced the cost and risk of serving user-generated content and allowed much of the existing work to be retained.

That pivot became ClickASnap.

The important part of the engagement was not simply delivering the first brief. It was using a relatively contained build to answer a commercial question, recognising when the data contradicted the original plan, and changing direction before the economics became an even larger problem.

Marc continued working with the client and specialist development team on product direction as ClickASnap evolved and grew internationally. It is a useful example of the way we prefer to work today: build enough to learn, keep the useful parts, and let evidence change the plan when it needs to.

Evidence source

Company press release, 31 December 2021: https://pressreleases.responsesource.com/news/102244/global-photo-sharing-site-clickasnap-shares-best-eight-photos-of-2021/