What's wrong with restarting Kinopoisk

    From the creators of the blockbuster “ What's wrong with restarting Kinopoisk

    Interest in restarting Kinopoisk does not fade even after Yandex rolled back everything . In one particular case, too much came together: the scale of the service’s audience, its position on the Internet, and the accumulated annoyance of Yandex users (and there are always no satisfied users).



    But let's change the angle, and look at what happened on the other hand: in the end, usually a crisis has a healing effect, allowing you to see what is really important and to learn lessons for the future. In the situation with the restart of “Kinopoisk” there are some positive aspects.

    #1. Universal Online Cinema


    What is the problem of legal online movie theaters in RuNet? Except, of course, a strange craving to duplicate everything, ignoring the needs of the Anglobogs and subtitle boyars. That there are too many of them. And everyone holds his own piece of copyright pie, fighting off sticks from anyone who wants to encroach on their share. At the same time, in RuNet there are beautifully high-quality, paid, but pirated services, which do not give a damn about the borders drawn by copywriters on their contour maps of world domination, and lay out everything in a row, which is only interesting to more than two solvent audiences.

    In this sense, NewKinopoisk may become the first sign of a legal universal cinema, where there is everything. The developers wrote that they spent a significant part of the time to make a universal player, because say, a one-window service where you can watch videos from all connected services - but their voices drowned in the opposite chorus of indignant demands to go with their players to the forest and return everything as it was. Nevertheless, there is a player, there is a website, and although it is on a subdomain, it works: video from the cinema "Amediateka", ivi.ru, Megogo.net, Tvzavr.ru, Pladform, VGTRK, "STS Media", Rutube, Ayyo is displayed in a universal player with a single design for everyone. Registration is also simplified to the limit: in two clicks through a Yandex account without having to go somewhere. Only payment remains divided, but they also promise to do something about it. By the way, by the way, on NewKinopoisk, by the way, they finally added normal episode lists for TV shows, which was not the case before,

    In general, if Yandex hadn’t tried to smuggle this online supermarket under the guise of the good old Kinopoisk with a blue eye, the reaction to the efforts of the team of their developers could have been completely different. However, on another domain, on this domain or something else - Yandex Cinema has at least a good chance of success, because this is the answer to a real market request. A kind of "Yandex market" for online rental.

    I would not particularly recommend rejoicing to the online distributors themselves about this, but I advised using the reviews of online stores connected to the Market as a crystal ball showing the future, especially in the last couple of years - and reading about commissions and that's it -all. Or read what taxi cabs connected to Yandex Taxi write. However, no one regrets taxi drivers - and no one will regret Ivi.ru either.

    # 2 We found out what people appreciated in Kinopoisk


    The second positive point is a gigantic stream of feedback, sometimes incoherent, but quite accessible for analysis and structuring. The main thing is to isolate the emotional component, and against the background of the emotional upsurge, the CSV of the previous KP developers went up to 9.5 / 10 at least - they say, a brilliant site, and we are geniuses of pure beauty, we knew everything right away, were right about everything, etc. .

    One thing that I have always known about Kinopoisk (and my profile on the site is 8 years old, and I visit it almost every day): that the site is shit. Slow, with a wildly uncomfortable interface, often lagging. I repeat, I’ve been on the site for 8 years, but I haven’t remembered the difference between the My Movie Search menu and the User Profile menu:



    In one of them my ratings for films are hidden, in the other - the actual lists of films. Where is the logic? And there are hundreds of such moments. Those. The site update has been asking for a long time. Of course, one had to try very hard to remake the far from ideal site so that even his critics understood how much they really loved him.

    It’s almost the plot of the melodrama in the language of bits and bytes: you live like that with an old unloved wife, you have only seen wrinkles and cracks in her for a long time, and then such a smiling salesman comes to your doorstep, and without asking, picks up your wife, and instead slip her a silicone doll with big boobs and smooth skin - just dumb, braked and inanimate. And so you rush to the rescue of your wife, 25 minutes of high-budget action, enemies are defeated, news stories are choked, retelling your story, and you meet your old woman and look at her through the eyes of a man who has fallen in love again - music, credits.

    But this is a movie. In life, after the credits, the old woman still needs to go to the dentist, replace her hip, transplant her kidneys and put a pacemaker - otherwise the veil will drop from her eyes and everything will go again. In the end, I saw statistics somewhere that over the past 2 years, Kinopoisk’s daily traffic has decreased - from 20 to 15 million per day, or something like that. Not because the audience was impatiently waiting for an online cinema in its place, as Yandex effective managers thought, but because they completely scored all site updates, with the exception of content ones.

    Now, at least Yandex knows for sure that their user content is dear to people - perhaps it should be more noticeable to reflect on the main one, and not hide it in the menus.

    And Yandex is now aware of how valuable Kinopoisk’s analytical capabilities were to people — the ability to twist, rotate and compare virtually any data in any form is the geek’s dream.

    Now I have a huge array of first-hand data that the analyst could not give them (everyone probably already read that the company's managers simply threw out services whose attendance seemed to them too low - of course they judged them on the basis of statistics, and severely broke off ): what was actually expensive for users, what should be saved, and what should be improved. How Yandex will manage this is another question, because, as it seems to me, the old KP structure, with all its capabilities, is simply not crammed into the new "beta" design. Those. the player is ok, and everything else, in a good way, would be thrown out and started again. But, again, the ball is on the side of Yandex: they could not even dream of such an amount of food for thought in other circumstances. And now - please meditate.

    # 3 Geeks rule and pedal


    The third positive effect of restarting Kinopoisk is that the voices of geeks mean something. At least for Yandex. Morally, and this was evident from the comments, the majority was ready to be beaten up right now, but they would ignore us, leave everything as it is, and especially violent people would be accused of stealing the forest and banned - oh, excuse me, this is from another story. But, in essence, they had opportunities for this. True, the attendance of the new KP, of course, would have sagged, but it’s not yet a fact how everything would turn out in six months.

    But, apparently, even if the culture of launching projects in Yandex is not the same, Yandex itself is not yet aware that it has changed, and continues to consider itself a friendly company and monitors the mood of users. And so I did not turn a blind eye to the rage of the commentators. This is good news for everyone - after all, but they heard us, and civil society, at least inside Runet, is capable of something.

    In hindsight it is seen that in Runet almost the perfect orange revolution took place:

    1. an event that triggered an avalanche
    2. the launch of the site, which, on the one hand, aggregates negative reviews, and on the other, adds legitimacy to the indignation: “Look, 96% also do not agree!”,
    3. internal opposition, merging an ugly insider at the most unpleasant moment for the “regime",
    4. thousands of infantry attacking with furious and, often, beyond the bounds of decency and common sense, messages of all in a row who, as it seems to them, are involved in the initial event,
    5. Media coverage of what is happening, turning it from a local riot into the central event of the day, and at the same time, acting as involuntary coordinators of what is happening,
    6. trembled leadership, rollback.

    Rumors and hints of “staging an attack”, Photoshop at the State Department’s safe houses and the registration of the newkinopoisk.ru domain back in April, only add spice to the situation.

    From the general arsenal were not involved except hacks with greetings from the virtual opposition on the face of the site.

    There is no doubt that in one form or another, this will be repeated in some form and further on for any reason that overly touches the audience of certain projects. There is nothing beautiful, of course, in what happened - it is worth at least reading that the same Internet infantry wrote, without understanding, to the same victims of the restart - the editorial board of KP:



    - but such is the price of mistakes, greed and inability to hear, that is how the process of grinding corporations to society looks like. Because the ideal of business, in essence, is simple: a site on which one button is “Put money here,” and an endless stream of users with open Internet wallets. And users, in turn, though some services, services, quality. Respect, after all. And sometimes you just need a big crisis to remind that users are not just purses with legs, and to establish / restore some boundaries and rules.

    What these rules should be - a topic for a separate article, or maybe a book - “Film Search Lessons”, relatively speaking. But the short version was well formulated by Tyoma , who, by the way, has not been involved in the declining quality of Yandex service design for several years:

    1) Design should be done for people, not for other designers. Even if other designers did not appreciate your design, and people like it, then fuck other designers. Killing the functionality that people used is the biggest nonsense in the world. Forskver, the leader in spitting on people's habits, do not take an example from him.

    2) User data is the most sacred. If a person has driven something into any form, it is necessary to love, protect and preserve it. If a person is storing some content on the site (texts, pictures, ratings, etc.), then you need to protect this more than the apple of an eye.
    (By the way, I would not bet money on it, but if Yandex again turned to Lebedev for service design, I would not be surprised).

    So I got three things that are “so” in the story with the restart of “Movie Search”. Perhaps the comments count them even more.

    Also popular now: