My role
Behavior Design, Wireframing, Interaction Design, and Prototyping

Increase of the platform’s revenue around 50%

Increase of app’s DAU/MAU

Decrease uninstall rate of apps (Android and IOS)

CIAYO Comics is a comics platform where people can find and read comics online. We start with a very small and simple platform and continuously growing by adding more comic titles and improvements to serve our users. Within 3 years from CIAYO Comics launch for the first time in the Google Playstore and Apple Appstore, it has more than 100k of monthly active users (MAU) and have more than 1 million downloads in Playstore.

After running for 3 years we decided to start to monetize our platform, but we want to make sure that our way of monetization didn’t break user experience and satisfaction. Therefore, after going through long discussion and a lot of consideration, in its 3rd year CIAYO Comics launched its first premium subscription package called CIAYO Comics PLUS+.

CIAYO Comics PLUS+ gives user privilege to access premium comics category, 2 episodes early access for some popular comic titles, cool exclusive avatar border, and remove all ads inside the platform. CIAYO Comics PLUS+ get very positive feedback from its users and the revenue we got from this subscription plan was as good as our expectation and our premium users are continuing to grow from month to month.

Even our subscription plan gave a very good response and the revenue we got was good enough, we do not want to feel satisfied yet and slacking with the results. We try to find out how to improve our business model and how can we serve more users and get a wider market. Then we find out that there was still a lot of our user that only following a few comic titles and they think that our subscription plan was not worth enough if they only read a few comic every month. This data leads us to a new option of monetization, we create a currency for our platform called CIAYO Keys. With this key user can unlock premium comics and early access episodes that previously only can be accessed using the subscription plan, and they can get this key by purchase it from our in-app store.

With this new option, the user can adjust their spending based on their needs, and with this method, the company has succeeded to reach previously untouched markets and get more revenue from here.

Now we have 2 monetization methods in our platform and both methods perform well, and users also happy, all seems like a very perfect win-win solution for user and company. But, we believe there is always room for improvement. Now we have got both market (subscription and on-demand), how can we increase our revenue from here? There is one more market that CIAYO did not yet reach out there and it has the biggest portion on the market, that market that we usually called free users.

Almost all markets, especially on digital platforms, the biggest users portion are taken by free users. We believe this kind of user still has its own potential to generate revenue for us if we treat them right. Free users of course desiring the privilege of premium users, but they don’t want to spend a penny. However, even they are not willing to spend their money, we still can make them spend their time in exchange for something they desire. We offer them to watch ads for key.

By adding these 2 additional methods, our revenue has increased more than 50% compared to the subscription plan method only. But not only the revenue, there is something else that also indirectly affected by these additional methods and we will discuss about this in the next section.

While we develop these features, our marketing team also working hard to increase our user base and expand the markets. With our market growing bigger, our revenue from these 3 monetization methods also gets bigger too and all parties are getting the benefit from our platform.

Even the last two methods have been successfully increasing the company bottom line, it also designed with more intentional than only to increasing our revenue. We believe if we make people spending with keys and give them permanent access to chapters they have unlocked will give them the feeling of belonging for that content. By the time, users have unlocked many chapters and they will continually unlocking more and more chapters. The more chapters they have unlocked make them feel unable to throw away all their belonging and they tend to be more loyal to our platform.

Few months from these features shipped to users, our data showing the increase of our retention rate, DAU/MAU, and the decrease of uninstall rate from our users, and users with more key spending also has a lower rate of abandoning our platform.

All these features are developed under the scrum and lean UX methods. All the design has been through the UX life cycle until it passed to the programming team. I have been helped by 2 UX Researchers to conduct user interview and testing, and 1 data analyst on helping me for extracting and read data. 

We are still working on this platform and always continuing to develop and improve so that we can serve our users in a better way. Thank you for reading and see you in my other posts.