In this blog, our aim is to delve into the experiences of our valued users who have found success and support through the Hydro platform.
Each blog post like this will feature a Q&A session where clients share their unique stories. In today’s blog, we hear from the studytogether CEO as he explains how Hydro has positively impacted their platform.
H: How did you integrate Hydro?
ST: Integrating Hydro was extraordinarily easy! We have both a Webflow frontend app and NextJS SPA. It was as simple as creating the account on Hydro, creating the website configs, and adding the JS code. We were up and running in literally minutes.
H: How was the implementation process in terms of difficulty?
ST: Easier than setting up Google Analytics! It is literally 10x easier than setting up and optimizing ads.
H: How much revenue are you generating per week?
ST: Hydro generates US$385-US$400 per week for us.
H: Do you have any stats on users?
ST: Sessions: We see about 1.4M sessions per week on Hydro and about 180k user sessions on Google Analytics. I attribute that difference to the fact that Hydro counts sessions very differently than Google Analytics, and we’ve seen that Google Analytics also undercounts due to AdBlocker and EU cookie policies.
Engagement: We see roughly 1.3M minutes per week spent on our website, per Hydro data. Google Analytics would imply around 800k minutes per week spent on our website. We attribute this difference largely to Google Analytics undercounting due to AdBlocker and EU cookie policies. We’ve found that the ratio of user engagement between Hydro and Google Analytics tracks with the difference we see in our Mixpanel analytics which includes users who are using AdBlockers and doesn’t require tracking cookies.
Only 30% of our traffic comes from “tier-1” advertising countries, while the remaining 70% is mostly “tier-3” advertising countries. We’ve been turned away from every high-end advertising network because of that. Hydro is literally the only reason we’re able to continue operating our website.
H: What service does your website offer?
ST: Our site serves college students around the world and helps them study and find study buddies online.
H: Comparison to Ad Revenue
ST: Our ad revenue is seriously disappointing! We’re seeing around $0.50 per 1k impressions (RPM). This ends up generating around US$400-500/month, which is less than 30% of what Hydro generates for us! The huge difference is likely driven by 3 main factors: our audience has low purchasing power (college students), 70% of our audience comes from low-income countries, and our young audience has disproportionately high AdBlocker utilization.
H: Has Hydro impacted the overall user experience on your platform?
ST: Hydro hasn’t impacted our website’s user experience whatsoever. Our biggest concern when adopting Hydro was that they would be running web mining, sending large amounts of network traffic, or take up lots of memory. None of our users have reported any UX issues since the Hydro rollout.
H: How would you rate the customer support and service provided by Hydro?
ST: The Hydro community on Telegram is great and support is responsive.
H: Would you recommend Hydro to others?
ST: Yes, yes, yes!
This is just one example of a client seeing tremendous success from the Hydro platform. As time goes on and we begin to roll out the different tiers of Hydro we expect to see similar testimonials to this one. Keep an eye out for them!
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