NEW INFO 5 Results from share redemption are posted. Less than .2% redeemed. Very bullish as investors are showing extreme confidence in the future of PLBY.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/playboy-mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-120000721.html NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1.
https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%)
NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar.
https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866 NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below
https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis !!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should.
In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase.
Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below:
https://www.playboy.com/ https://www.playboytv.com/ https://www.playboyplus.com/ https://www.iplayboy.com/ Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success.
“Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.”
https://www.scientificgames.com/ https://www.microgaming.co.uk/ “This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.”
https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/ As per their SEC filing:
“Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1 They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon.
https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea “Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.”
“According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently:
https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress.
Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait.
https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/ Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said.
https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05 Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.”
“In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.”
They are profitable across all three of their current business segments.
“Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.”
https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world.
"Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.”
Also in the SEC filing, the
Time Frame:
“As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn.
The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :(
He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :)
Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw.
I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003 Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this:
“Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy.
“Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative.
https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html Y’all like that China money?
“Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.”
Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose.
I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing “Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.”
“Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.”
Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong.
Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will.
Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way.
Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains.
TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here:
WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf Or here:
https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.”
STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon.
Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.
submitted by ![Autochess: Market Status and Design Analysis [effort post]](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/OwL9a9QwjLtlx218SIQEQFEkvKu62q0uOafEBE_vaRE.jpg "Autochess: Market Status and Design Analysis [effort post]") | This article was written with the feedback of ~300 highly engaged players from the different autochess reddit communities (TFT, DOTA Underlords, Chess Rush...), which participated in interviews and on a poll whose results are available here. They’re especially thanked by name at the end of the article. In January 2019, Drodo Studio’s Dota Auto Chess mod became insanely popular. Many companies (including household names like Valve, Riot, Ubisoft and Blizzard) rushed to release their own versions. It seemed like the beginning of something big like MOBA or Battle Royale. But it has been more than a year now and the hype seems to have vanished completely. As quickly as it rose, it went away… This is the first on a series of articles where we will analyze the autochess genre. Here we will be exploring the genre’s history, its current market situation and its audience. And also, what are the core design issues that autochess suffers and that no one has been able to solve yet. https://preview.redd.it/tc2c19k4ipg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=487539f51e104ee7d1aae1a6ded7447b1dee11ca It really helps me if you check this article (or similar content) at my blog https://jb-dev.net/ A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE This wasn’t the first time that a mod got the spotlight and ended up becoming the foundation of a genre. It happened in several major, industry-defining cases before (some of which are Team Shooters, MOBAs, Battle Royale…). But on some of these cases events unfolded differently. So we identify 3 distinctive eras related to the evolution of the industry: 1st Era (2000s): Assimilation The company whose original software had been modded (or had a close enough game, like Valve) moved quickly to absorb the successful mods and turn them into even more successful products. Since at that point creating a major game release was very complex (required an expensive development, publishing deals and an infrastructure to distribute the product), the deal was profitable for both sides. But it meant the dissolution of the identity of the original creator team, which became embedded in the bigger company culture. https://preview.redd.it/abyi6d2jipg61.png?width=461&format=png&auto=webp&s=d4171bf9344a162e695a75a91d18eec8206b9123 Team Fortress (1999) was originally a Quake mod. And Counter-Strike (2000) started out as a fan-made mod on the Half Life engine. Both games (and creators) were quickly absorbed by Valve.
2nd Era (2010s): Integration By this time, the previous era model still was going on… but the gaming industry had significatively grown a lot and it was also possible for smaller or even new companies to lure the original developers, and use the mod as a proof for commercial success in order to secure funding and develop it as a full title. The main characteristic of this era is that the original developers were able to keep a bigger share of control and relevance, rather than being integrated as just another gear on a bigger machine, because the companies they joined built their own identity around that key product. This was the case of Riot Games: They were able to raise enough money for the creation of their company through family and angel investors, and then hire some of the original creators of DOTA, and then created League of Legends. https://preview.redd.it/vl6h2l7lipg61.png?width=763&format=png&auto=webp&s=414abb3da2b169966b7bf757a6116f86ef3748d2 Defense of the Ancients (DotA), the foundational title for the MOBA genre, appeared in 2003 as a fan-made custom scenario of Warcraft 3. Foreseeing commercial potential on a full game based on the concept, Riot games and Valve both battled for the Dota IP and the original developers, eventually releasing rival titles League of Legends and Dota2. Interestingly, Blizzard (owners of Warcraft 3) tried to replicate the success without the mod creators in Heroes of the Storm (2015), which hasn’t been as successful as the other two.
A similar case happened with battle royale, which also started in 2013 as a successful DayZ mod created by the modder nicknamed PlayerUnknown. Later, it was transformed into a full product through the acquisition of the developer by a korean company (which would later be renamed as the PUBG Corporation, again showing how the company grew around the game rather than assimilating it). This case hints what would later happen with Auto Chess, since Fortnite wasn’t involved in any way with the original creators. They just copied the concept. Fortnite was a product stuck in a kind of development hell (had been 6 years in the works). As the game was getting close to the release, the developers became impressed by PUBG’s success, so they created a quick Battle Royale spin-off which became insanely popular and eventually ate the rest of the game. https://preview.redd.it/zkdv4jjqipg61.png?width=808&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e7ad39e5db4d83b6b927587b59bf1c81fe0ef85 Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (2017), foundational title of the modern battle royale genre, is the successor of PlayerUnknown’s DayZ: Battle Royale, a popular mod for DayZ (which on itself is a mod of ArmA3, making it a mod of a mod lol). The success of PUBG inspired Fortnite (a title on the later stages of a troubled development at the time) to spin towards that genre, becoming PUBG‘s main competitor.
3rd Era (2020s): Fragmentation In all the cases presented previously, the newborn genre ended up in the release of one or two titles which accumulated most of the business. But this hasn’t been the case here. In Autochess, the newborn genre has been quickly fragmented into a big list of competitors. Some are standalone games (like DOTA Underlords or Autochess: Origins), but there’s also several service-model games which released their autochess mode as well (like Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds or TeamFight Tactics, which at the end of the day is a side-game mode of League of Legends). This creates an interesting precedent, which I believe will define future cases where an innovative new game concept appears: The hot idea will be cloned very fast because today the main bottleneck in the industry is having an innovative design that generates player interest and engagement. By 2020, it’s way easier to create and distribute a game, there are way more developers hungry for a hit than ever before, and a lot of service-model games with short development cycles always looking for something juicy for their next update… so new ideas becoming red oceans fast will be the norm. For sure, this won’t affect the ability of small developers and modders to innovate, but it will affect their ability to leverage that to become successful on an independant level, before they get cloned. https://preview.redd.it/51jbq4jwipg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=fdfcfeb82e73b48210c4d93386438268d6dcbe3b Dota Auto Chess, was a Dota 2 mod which obtained massive popularity. After a failed acquisition from Valve (owners of Dota), the mod developers (Drodo Studios) went to create the mobile standalone Auto Chess: Origins, while still maintaining the PC version linked to Valve.
Meanwhile, Riot, Valve, Ubisoft and many other companies developed and released their own autobattlers at a record time, downgrading the genre creators to just another competitor.
On Autochess, the fragmentation and fast release pace came at the cost of innovation, though. These games feature few unique selling points compared to the original DOTA Autochess experience: TFT’s ‘anti-snowballing’ character selection rounds, Underlord’s bosses and fast-track mode…. And ultimately, they haven’t fixed the core issues of the original game, which separates it from a true hyper-successful product like MOBA. MARKET STATUS Because of the rain of clones, it’s hard to map all the autochess games on the market. It doesn’t help that some of them are available in both PC and Mobile (playable in PC, Mac, Android and iOS), and also they’re exclusive to different PC stores ( Dota Underlords is only on Steam, TFT is on Riot’s LoL launcher, and Autochess Origins is only at the Epic Store…). And if that wasn’t enough, the Auto Chess mod in DOTA2 is still very active and has no signs that it’s going to be dying soon. It’s still being regularly updated, and presumably still profitable: Some months ago they added a battle pass system, with its revenue shared between Valve and Drodo. https://preview.redd.it/8w2lrid0jpg61.png?width=854&format=png&auto=webp&s=3697396edd8af2dff3f8e25cb2dd3829635506d0 What’s interesting is that none of the contenders has been able to become massively successful in terms of monetization, at least not in terms comparable to even a second or third tier MOBA. And while there are definitively different tiers of following among these titles (led by Riot Games’ TeamFight Tactics), it seems that none of them has been able to gather under its banner a significant amount of players, mobile downloads or Twitch Views… Sources: AppAnnie (mobile metrics), TwitchMetrics (twitch) So ultimately, we’re dividing the autochess market into 3 categories: Squires, Would-be Kings and Peasants. - Squires: Rather than standalone games, these are side-modes of already successful products. Under this category we would list the Battlegrounds mode in Hearthstone, or League of Legends’ TFT, and maybe even the original DOTA Autochess mod. While for sure they’ll have their own dedicated audience that only plays those modes, for most players it’s just a nice and fresh activity integrated within a broader game experience. The squires are the ones that have achieved the biggest success among the autochess genre because they don’t suffer as much backlash from the lack of gameplay depth inherent to the genre, which is harmful for the long term retention: Even if the mode eventually becomes a bit shallow, players have many other things to play, and thus are retained. As a consequence, these games can still monetize significatively by selling renewals of their Battle Passes every new season. Not enough to make them successful on the degree that was expected… but at least it’s something. Other than bringing an additional source of revenue, these modes were useful to their core games: They generated player interest by providing innovative gameplay. Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds was an amazing addition to the CCG genre, and made a lot of people come back to the game to discover the new mode and reengage.
https://preview.redd.it/1qhlvvd6jpg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c56f59cc22cf8e0d0207abc424dca9e976c5685c SQUIRE: The gameplay of TeamFight Tactics (slow tempo, no team coordination, decreased attention requirement…) makes it a nice relief mode to play between LOL matches, which is its purpose in the foreseeable future. If there ever was an intention to make it a standalone game, it vanished together with the player interest on autochess…
- Would-be Kings: These are the other two top dogs of the category. They were supposed to rule… but that looking at the numbers they don’t really seem to have ever lifted off. Under this category we would list Auto Chess: Origins and DOTA Underlords. The problem is that their standalone approach means that they suffer the most of the design issues of the genre that we’ve presented in the last section of this article (i.e. flat complexity, lack of mastery depth, lack of progression and rotative meta…). That means that they lost a lot of population over time, and therefore their Battle Pass renewal isn’t as effective at generating revenue : (
https://preview.redd.it/p2n125v9jpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=59aa81130d41566a336413dafc3e2317d80d3d24 DOTA Underlords is an extremely polished product in terms of graphics, character design and UX, and yet another proof that Valve devs really know how to do great games. Too bad they aren’t as good at releasing third installments.
THE AUDIENCE We are of the belief that you can’t talk about a game and not talk about who plays it, and that players say more about a game than analyzing all its features and mechanics. So with this in mind we collected answers from ~300 autochess players (check the raw data here). After examining their responses, we’ve identified 3 main player profiles (the comments on each profile are literal): https://preview.redd.it/satixy6cjpg61.png?width=934&format=png&auto=webp&s=80623e39c57f1252b3fc5d04db1d2a20b06928e2 - Patricks, gamers looking for a competitive-but-idle experience that doesn’t require full attention and it’s easily reconcilable with their functional adult life.
- Grizzlies, competitive players that struggle with fast paced games that demand a high actions per minute ratio and quick reflexes (like MOBAs or competitive shooters).
- Warmasters, highly competitive players that enjoy more the area of strategy (setting up goals and planning how to achieve them) rather than tactics (skillful execution of actions and micromanagement).
What these profiles have in common, other than being hardcore gamers and having a big interest in competitive games, is the fact that they enjoy the lack of micromanagement, and the demand of reflexes and dexterity of autochess. This is quite interesting, considering that the genre foundation is so close to MOBAs, which are extremely demanding on those aspects. Overall it seems that they belong to audiences below the MOBA umbrella which are currently being alienated by the bulk of ‘younger and dexterity focused’ players. And when it comes to platforms, it seems that even though the barrier between the classic gaming platforms and mobile is progressively disappearing, the genre is still mainly focused on PC: Out of the ~300 players that answered, 50% said that they play exclusively on PC, 25% played primarily on Mobile, and the remaining 25% played in both. https://preview.redd.it/a25azxggjpg61.png?width=962&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc3677e4203abb44d5b60cc2b55e01f4fe839f74 Players said that they enjoy the focus of the game in planification, as opposed to the focus on execution and performance of MOBAs. And when asked about their main points of frustration, they pointed out 2 main topics: 1.- The strong luck factor that has a strong impact on making you win or lose regardless on how well you played. 2.- The fact that the game eventually becomes shallow and repetitive, fueled by the fact updates were unexciting and not rotating the meta.
Surprised by the fact that players mention randomness as a factor of both enjoyment and frustration? Don’t be! Competitive players tend to have a love-and-hate relationship with luck, because they tend to consider that external factors outside of skills (money spent, better draw…) stole their well deserved victory. And it’s even more frustrating in autochess, because there’s a strong snowball effect: Players that obtain a big advantage early on in the game become hard to catch later on. Which means that a few bad or good draws early on can decide the rest of the match. There hasn’t been a single feature more criticised in Magic: The Gathering than the randomness of drawing mana. And yet, luck it’s part of what makes MTG stand out compared to other CCGs: For experienced players, it introduces uncertainty and the need to take risks and gamble, like they’d do in poker. And for rookies, it allows beating someone that has better skills and has a better deck, if Lady Luck is on their side. Won’t happen often, but it will feel awesome when it does. Like a friend likes to say: The best feeling in MTG is to draw a mana when you really need it. And the worst? To draw it when you didn’t. This goes to say that in autochess, perhaps the power of luck needs to be reviewed, but it would be a bad decision to completely remove luck from the equation. DESIGN CHALLENGES In this awesome DoF article, Giovanni Ducati already pointed out the two main problems that the games in this genre need to solve to achieve real success: Bad long term retention and low monetization. To these issues we would add a third one, which is bad marketability: Contrary to their big brothers League of Legends and DOTA2, these games haven’t been able to achieve high organic downloads (at least not to be able to generate significant revenue through soft monetization mechanics). What’s even worse is that all these games, their themes and target audience are quite close to RPG and Strategy, which are genres with some of the highest CPIs on the market. So they need top-of-the-class retention and monetization to get a high enough LTV to scale up. But why do these games fail at keeping players entertained for a long time? And why don’t they monetize enough? Here’s what we think: Flat Complexity & Progression You have some games out there which have a strong entry barrier due to being quite complicated to grasp. But for those that can deal with the numbers and stats, the depth will keep them entertained for months and years. This is the case in most RPGs and 4X strategy games. And then you have hypercasual games, which are simple and plug and play. So they generate a great early engagement, but are too shallow to keep users hooked for a long time. As a genre, Autochess games are in the middle ground: they have a high entry barrier, but also lack the complexity to keep players engaged for a long time… As a general rule, games with long retention tend to follow Bushnell’s Law of being easy to learn and difficult to master. They achieve that by having what we call an unfolding experience: They appear simpler at the beginning (not necessarily easy), but require thousands of hours of practice to master. An example of this are games that level lock most of the game complexity, so the player understands and masters only a set starter mechanics. And then, progressively unlock new modes and demand more specialized builds and gameplay, repeating the cycle several times to keep the game always interesting while attempting to avoid being overwhelming. https://preview.redd.it/e9f8s8tkjpg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=825c85b7c479b3bf05fc43ac668cbd1eddf17c97 In World of Warcraft, character depth is huge. But this complexity is unfolded progressively, forcing the player to spend time mastering each skill and activity as they level up, before moving further.
Another approach to the same idea are competitive games focused on mechanical ability, dexterity or micromanagement. Like CS:GO or Rocket League. They may unlock all the mechanics from the beginning, but a newbie player will only be able to focus and manage some of them, and then progressively discover and master the rest in an organic way. https://preview.redd.it/42cbth8njpg61.png?width=951&format=png&auto=webp&s=241cd59b4468cabf2d0d24e1a4e3a703b74ada51 Rocket League hides its complexity by matchmaking early players with others of a similar skill. This makes beginner players viable even if they grasp only the basic mechanics. But, as they climb further, they’ll face rivals that take those basic skills for granted and the player will need to master more challenging techniques to keep up.
League of Legends and Overwatch are actually a combination of both: The game first introduces the player to a small selection of heroes which progressively gets expanded, while at the same time having an insane mastery depth that requires a high APM and reflexes, team coordination and thousands of hours of practice. Contrary to any of those examples, Autochess games throw everything at you from the beginning: Character Skills, Synergies, Unit Upgrade, Gold Management, Items… It’s a lot to swallow. And there’s not even enough time to read what each thing does before the timer runs out. This creates a complex, overwhelming first impression that drives many players out. But that’s quantity, not depth. Once you’ve gone through that traumatic starting phase, you’ve grasped all the mechanics and you know which team builds are dominating on the meta, it’s just a matter of making it happen by taking the right decisions and adapting to a few key draws. Eventually, unless luck is really against you, your skills won’t be challenged and you won’t have new mechanics to master. At that point, winning will be based more on the knowledge of the content database and luck rather than your planning and strategic ability. And that’s boring. So ultimately, these games are hard to grasp for a newbie, but also lack the ability to keep players interested for a very long time since they eventually run out of new features and mechanics to discover and master. Unexciting Updates, Lack of Collection On top of that, autochess games seem to have a hard time adding content which reawakens player interest and makes churned ones come back. https://preview.redd.it/52umfcvqjpg61.png?width=796&format=png&auto=webp&s=dd8095e71d025886d3c0313187ead49587459453 The DAU that we would expect on a long term retention game: A decreasing trend of players until reaching a stagnation stage. At that point, a big update (or new season) is required to attract and reengage users back with new content. This is the model we would see on Fortnite or Hearthstone, but it’s not what we see in most autochesses.
On this topic, perhaps the one that has put the most effort is Riot’s TFT. Each season update, the game releases a new series of heroes, synergies, items and rebalances, as well as a big bunch of cosmetics. This generates a short lived boost on revenue (due primarily to players buying the pass) and downloads, but ultimately nothing that really moves the needle in a relevant way. ‘ Why seasonal updates don’t work?‘, you may be asking. Part of the reason is that TFT, as well as every major contender do not include elements of content progression or collection. Instead, they all stick to the roguelike approach of the original mod: Players have access to the same set of units, and build their inventory exclusively during the match. While at first this seems a good idea, since it keeps the game fair in a similar way to MOBAs, it’s oblivious to the fact that new units do not offer the same amount of gameplay depth as in League of Legends. In LoL, a new unit means weeks or even months of practice until mastering timing, range and usage of the skills, how they interact with every other champion, etc… In comparison, in TFT the new content can be fully explored in just a bunch of matches, both because the new content doesn’t offer that much depth to start with and because it’s available from the moment the player gets the update. By lacking content progression and collection, autochesses miss the opportunity to create long term objectives after an update, more innovative mechanics and less repetitiveness. As a consequence, they have it really hard to hype players on updates. Big ‘Snowball Effect’ In game design, the snowball effect refers to the situation where obtaining an advantage or dominance generates further conditions that almost invariably means winning the match. As you can guess, on competitive games this effect can generate a bad experience, especially when the divergence starts early on: The player that obtained the early advantage will keep on increasing the advantage and curbstomp the rest. For example, this can happen on a Civilization game if a player gets ahead of the rest acquiring key resource territories, and uses them to achieve a greater progress in tech and income at a faster pace than the rest. Or in League of Legends if a team scores a bunch of early kills and levels up, becoming more able at scoring even more kills… https://preview.redd.it/s07v5umtjpg61.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae14e6101c2c35da175150251bf592d0598fb76c In this match of Age of Empires 2, the red player (Aztecs) managed to decimate the blue player (Turks) military units early on. Since without an army it was impossible for the blue player to secure enough resources to perform a comeback, for the next 2 hours the blue player was in a pointless, hopeless match. Kudos for not abandoning, though!
Autochess games have a huge snowball effect, due to the following reasons: - Resources lead to victories, victories lead to resources As you know, in autochess each player builds a team based on successive battles. Better battle performance will grant more gold, which is the resource used to buy units, perform shop rolls, etc… Similar to the cases we’ve already explained, this means that players that achieve early dominance will be able to to obtain more gold, use it to get better units and get more victories and gold, therefore increasing their team power faster than the rest. ‘But players can be lucky or unlucky, generating a factor that compensates for the advantage of having more resources early on‘, you may be considering. Unfortunately, this is a flawed logic, because of 2 main reasons: (1) Having more resources means more adaptability: The dominant players will be able to leverage on them to re-adapt their team, therefore outperforming the rest on a randomness-driven scenario. (2) Resources allow to buy more rolls, which diminishes the deviation generated by each individual roll.
https://preview.redd.it/srshcyzxjpg61.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=cc0313c25ed95c78b7277a7a95b6cecb4d2270b4 TeamFight Tactics attempts to decrease the snowball effect by introducing Carousels: rounds where all players pick a character from a list, and where the players that are losing (i.e. have less health) get to choose first. While this decreases the issue, it doesn’t really solve it… It just makes that smart players aim to lose on purpose at the beginning so they can get the better pick and generate the snowball slightly later on.
- Luck factor. The previous point goes into maintaining and increasing dominance once it has been achieved early on, but another source of frustration is that luck is a huge factor in achieving early dominance. This means that your strategic skills and smarts can be completely invalidated by a couple of bad rolls at the beginning of the match. And there’s nothing that competitive players hate more than having their match stolen by factors outside the pure clash of abilities.
As an antithesis, Poker also has resource management, and luck factor determines the victory (on a specific round). But unlike Autochess, resources can’t override luck, and early victories don’t affect the later chance of winning. Excessive Match Length Compared to PC, on mobile is much harder to keep the player focused for a long period of time on a single session. And having a very long minimum session kind of goes against the premise of being able to play anywhere which is a primary strength of mobile as a gaming platform. This is a problem for autochess games since a single match can last for 30-45 minutes of synchronous, nonstop gameplay. https://preview.redd.it/eh020bi1kpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e98aefdec1c79141d7fe13d02acfadb13e789b7 The knockout mode in Dota Underlords aims to make the game more accessible by skipping the slow beginning of the match (you start with a pre-setup army), and by simplifying the health and fusion systems. This shortens the matches to ~15 minutes, which is still too long for mobile, but better than 30. The problem is that it also increases the snowball effect, since the match has less turns to allow comebacks, and makes any mistake (or a bad roll) way more punishing.
‘Isn’t the solution just make the match shorter?’, you’re probably wondering. Unfortunately, there are several reasons that make this more challenging to the core design than what it seems: - Because in autochess the player builds its team from scratch, at the beginning of each match there are several turns to setup team foundations. Removing these early decisions severely decreases the teambuilding possibilities, decreasing overall depth.
- Also, each setup phase between clashes requires a minimum time to think and perform the actions. In the last turns of a match, the game can become quite demanding on thinking and input speed.
- Matches require a minimum amount of turns to compensate the weight of a single lucky/unlucky roll over the chances to win. Because the possible units for teambuilding appear on random rolls, the less turns there are the more luck factor the game will suffer, and as a consequence the less important the player’s strategic skills will be.
- And if there are few turns, there are also less chances for comebacks. Because it means that players will have less setup phases to adapt and catch a player that has obtained an early advantage.
- Finally, since the match involves 8 players, it requires a minimum of turns so that they all can fight between each other… Nevertheless, I don’t consider this a critical issue because Dota has been able to change this specific point on the knockout mode without sacrificing too much in terms of depth.
FINAL THOUGHTS The history of the autochess genre serves as an example of the risks of design endogamy: The devsphere rushed to clone Auto Chess, and before a year all the major contenders were in the board. But that speed came at a cost: None of these projects has brought the concept much further than its original conception, and in doing so they haven’t solved any of the core issues. https://preview.redd.it/jptzdrj8kpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f3fb34eb46b610e6ee355ba47782c804cb74186 The folks at Riot games developed the TeamFight Tactics in less than 5 months. This allowed them to release while the hype was still at its peak… but it also meant it added just a couple of improvements, and it’s otherwise very similar to the original Auto Chess mod.
After seeing all these projects fail to meet the big expectations that were placed on them, the question is if perhaps the best approach was to avoid rushing, and instead tackle the genre with a title that is not a clone, but rather a more groomed, accessible and innovative successor of the original idea. In our next article on this series will make an attempt to see how such a game could be, rethinking the spirit and fresh design ideas of autochess to solve the issues mentioned above. (May take a while though, I want to focus on smaller articles for a couple of months…) Meanwhile, if you want to read more about this genre, we suggest you these awesome articles from the folks at DoF: Why Auto-Chess can’t monetize – and how to fix that and How Riot can turn TFT into a billion dollar game Special Thanks to… These articles wouldn’t have been possible with the collaboration of ~300 members of the reddit communities of the different auto chess games who provided us with feedback and data. You folks have been incredible solving all our doubts. One thing that this genre has is some of the most awesome players around. So big kudos for Brxm1, Erfinder Steve, Xinth, Zofia the Fierce, STRK1911, LontongSinga22, bezacho, hete, NeroVingian, marling2305, NOVA9INE , asidcabeJ, Eidallor, Rhai, Lozarian, bwdm, Toxic, Ruala, Papa Shango, MrMkay, Dread0, L7, kilmerluiz, Amikals, Sworith, Tankull, B., hete, Bour, Denzel, DeCeddy, Diaa, hamoudaxp, Benjamin “ManiaK” Depinois, Katunopolis, DanTheMan, MikelKDAplayer, 0nid, Tobocto, Tiny Rick, phuwin, Alcibiades, triceps, d20diceman, shadebedlam, stinky binky, Tutu, Myuura, suds, Kapo, Hearthstoned, Engagex, Pietrovosky, Daydreamer, Doctor Heckle, Ignis, ShawnE, NastierNate, LeCJ, Nene Thomas, Chris, trinitus_minibus, Nah, Kaubenjunge1337, Mudhutter, Asurakap, Nicky V, shinsplintshurts, bobknows27, Willem (Larry David Official on Steam), Jonathan, Dinomit24, Monstertaco, GangGreen69, Veshral Amadeus Salieri (…lol!), Kuscomem, Cmacu, Pioplu, Dilemily, qulhuae, Ilmo, MarvMind, facu1ty, crayzieap, Saint Expedite, Lobbyse, Lukino , tomes, Blitzy24, Mcmooserton, magicmerl, i4got2putsumpantzon, radicalminusone, Pipoxo, Kharambit, Bricklebrah, Rbagderp, Merforga, Superzuhong, Mo2gon, MoS.Tetu, MeBigBwainy, Zokus, CoyoteSandstorm, Stehnis, Noctis, Fkdn, Ray, Fairs1912, Fairs1912, Krakowski, HolyKrapp, Damadud, Pentium, Mach, Mudak, CaptSteffo, jwsw1990, Omaivapanda, Inquisitor Binks, Jack, yggdranix, GoodLuckM8, Centy, Prabuddha (aka Walla), dtan, Philosokitteh, Doms, ZEDD, Calloween, Synsane, Kaluma, GordonTremeshko , Djouni, DOGE, haveitall, ANIM4SSO, Task Manager, Submersed, BAKE, Viniv, La Tortuga Zorroberto, BixLe, Rafabeen, Blzane, bdlck666, FatCockNinja86, R.U.Sty, Yopsif, blesk, Quaest0r, FanOfTaylor, StaunchDruid, Rushkoski and everyone else that took some minutes to help us out on the article. submitted by JB-Dev-Bcn to TeamfightTactics [link] [comments] |
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There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..
Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.
So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.
P.S: startups, and seo loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too. A bit of backstory:
If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process. So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:
- Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
- Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
- Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
- How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
- How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO
Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO
Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.
Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."
If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:
- Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
- Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!
Technical SEO Basics
Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.
Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).
Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.
Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.
Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]
Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.
If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.
Advanced Technical SEO
Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.
Here’s how to do that:
Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.
After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.
So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:
- Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
- Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
- Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
- JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
- Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.
Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).
Lastly, i
f you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*
In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be: - LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
- FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms
- CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1
Step #2 - Keyword Research
Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.
The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.
First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.
You can use the sheet to:
- Prioritize content
- Keep track of the publishing process
- Get a top-down view of your web pages
And here’s what it covers:
- Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.
- Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…
- Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
- Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
- Priority 1 - These are low priority.
- Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…
- 1 - Not written
- 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
- 3 - The article is being written
- 4 - The article is in editing phase
- 5 - The article is published on the blog
- Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.
- Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.
- CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.
Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.
How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)
There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).
Our favorite method, however, is as follows…
Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.
The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.
Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.
Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.
Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.
Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.
Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.
Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.
Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.
At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.
Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages
Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:
- Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
- Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.
Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.
You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.
Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.
Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.
Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”
Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.
With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”
What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.
Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content
Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.
As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…
- Lead generation techniques
- SaaS marketing
- SEO content
After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.
On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:
- Create a comprehensive content outline
- Get the writing part right
Here’s how each of these work...
How to Create a Content Outline for SEO
A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:
- Which headers and subheaders you should use
- What’s the optimal word count
- What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
- If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)
Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.
At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.
So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…
- Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
- Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
- For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
- For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
- Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?
How to Write Well
There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.
Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):
- Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
- Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
- Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
- Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
- Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
- Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.
Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations
Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.
If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.
In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.
To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:
- Well-written
- Long-form
- Easy to navigate
- Well-formatted (to enhance UX)
So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).
Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.
In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.
Pro Tip
Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!
Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.
For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.
Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question:
“how do you do link-building?” 4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website
There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.
We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).
What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:
- Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
- Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
- “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
- Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.
Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.
However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:
- 10,000+ traffic within a week
- 15+ leads
- 50+ links
...And so much more, all through a
single blog post.
Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing
“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?” I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?
Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…
“Right?” Well, not quite.
The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:
- Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
- Research the type of content your audience loves
- Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
- Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1
Nothing too new, right?
Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.
Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:
How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long),
and got 10k+ traffic as a result. A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.
Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).
We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.
Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.
Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.
So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:
- How to create good content to drive users
- Promote your content
- Rank on Google
- Create viral infographics
- Create a micro-site
...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.
On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.
Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.
So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.
We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:
- entrepreneur and startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
- Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
- Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
- Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
- Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
- Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
- Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
- Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
- Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
- Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.
And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.
Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.
As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).
A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.
The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!
And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.
Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages
One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.
So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.
The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.
Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.
Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.
So, how do you do interlinking “right?”
First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.
More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.
Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.
The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.
Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:
site:yourwebsite.com "keyword" In our case, that’s:
site:example.com “business process management”
You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.
Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!
You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.
Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs
Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.
Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.
If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.
On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.
So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.
Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?
Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.
Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.
So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.
Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:
- 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
- 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
- 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
- 4th pos. -> 13.60%
- 5th -> 9.51%
- 6th -> 6.23%
- 7th -> 4.15%
- 8th -> 3.12%
- 9th -> 2.97%
Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...
Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:
- Page title
- Page URL
- Old Headline
Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:
- CTR (28 Day Range)
- Avg. Position
Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.
Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the
Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.
For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.
Once you implement the change, insert the date on the
Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.
Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.
If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the
Date Implemented column once again.
Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go
You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.
If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.
Here’s what this usually looks like for us:
- Audit the content
- Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
- Is the content well-written?
- Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
- Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.
- Audit internal links
- Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
- Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.
- Audit the backlinks
- Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
- Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
- Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
- Did you disown low-quality or spam links?
- Audit web page
- Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
- Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
- Did you compress all images on the web page?
...And that's it.
Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.
If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our
SEO process blog post here.
Google lifted its gambling apps’ ban mid-2017, allowing casinos and bookmakers to avail their apps on Google Play once again. Despite this, most people around the world can’t download their favourite real money gambling apps on the Google Play Store. Although the giant tech company accepts casino apps on its store, it has inflexible rules for Google Play has updated its policies to allow gambling and betting apps in 15 more countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, and the US. Google To Allow Gambling Apps In the Play Store - Slashdot. Android users in the U.S. will soon gain access to betting and gambling apps through the Play Store, Google announced Thursday. CNET reports: As of March 1, online casino games, sports betting, lotteries and daily fantasy sports apps will be allowed in certain states. Search engine giant Google announced yesterday that from 1st March this year they will be allowing gambling apps in their Google Play Store in the US, with android users being able to access casino games, sports betting, fantasy sports and lottery apps in certain states. Google have introduced a new ‘Developer Program Policy Preview’ which you can view here, which states: “Effective March 1st 2021, Subject to restrictions and compliance with all Google Play policies, we allow apps that Android users in regions other than the UK, Ireland, France and Brazil will soon be able to find and download real-money gambling apps from the Play Store.Google has updated its program policy Google has updated its program policy allowing apps that “enable or facilitate online gambling” in 15 more countries, including the US, starting on March 1st. In addition to making gambling applications available on the Play Store, the change in policy will also allow ads promoting real-money gambling to be served to users in those regions.
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