Concept

The best spot on the homepage should earn it

My hypothesis

Short vertical video will hold attention where stories didn’t, and shorten the path to a first message down to a single tap

Stories sat on the homepage right below the header – the most visible spot on the page. Yet only 7% of users ever opened it and 2% came back. The format was barely maintained and brought in no revenue. The best space on the page was taken by something that didn’t work

Context

Short vertical video is something people already know from other apps – they get absorbed in it on their own, no explanation needed. But watch time wasn’t the point. Video shows a person as they actually are: how they talk, move, joke around. Reaching out after that is easier than reaching out after a photo. So the chat and call buttons went straight into the player

The format

A feed you can message from

Context

Ordering comes from a recommendation system: people available for a call sit first. Within each group, clips are filtered by how they perform with the audience, then re-weighted per viewer – age, language, a bit of randomness. New clips get credited upfront so they don’t sink