Huseyin Kilic founded Interesting Engineering (IE) in 2010. The aim was to provide engineering, technology, and science enthusiasts with a platform that would help them to keep up with the latest developments in the science and technology field. And, dare we say, since the past 10 years, IE has been successfully reporting on breakthroughs in this niche.
Recently, IE achieved a great milestone- their website hit 1 million pageviews a day! This is indeed a huge feat, and IE’s efforts to reach such heights are surely commendable.
For a publisher, pageview is an important metric. Therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to share the key highlights of IE’s journey which led them to achieve 1 million pageviews/day.
Let’s start with a bit of background.
Interesting Engineering’s Backstory
Until mid-2011, IE was on Blogspot and has evolved extensively now. Huseyin started this venture as a student- he created the website and published articles on his own. When he got back to check on the website after university exams, Huseyin saw that about 1000 people had visited his website.
After noticing that the website was getting a good amount of attention, he created a Facebook page and took the whole thing a notch up. From that point on, IE has been witnessing a significant rise in the number of visitors.
Of course, it was not an overnight success. Huseyin grew his website consistently over the years, and today, IE has become one of the most popular websites among engineering and technology enthusiasts.
IE’s Use of Facebook as a Monetization Channel
Facebook has acted as a key monetization channel for IE since the very beginning. Today, it accounts for about 40% of IE’s traffic. With about 12 million followers, IE’s Facebook page has essentially evolved into a community.
Social media is the most powerful part of IE (in terms of growth factors), especially the Facebook page.
Huseyin Kilic
The interaction on Facebook, and other social media channels for that matter, between IE and its users, have contributed significantly to the website’s growth. Even though traffic through search has taken a hit recently due to the revised ranking policies of Google (introduction of Core Web Vitals, for instance), Facebook is constantly bringing a considerable amount of traffic for IE.
They also rely heavily on video content for leveraging Facebook as a monetization channel. This is definitely a smart strategy considering the popularity of video content these days.
Exploring further opportunities from social media, they are also leveraging Facebook news features. According to Ekin Koseoglu, COO of IE, they have seen positive results from this area, and they will continue to use it as a means of monetization in the future.
Improvement Strategies for IE
Every publisher knows that maintaining a website means putting continuous efforts towards improving strategies or structures in place while ensuring that new opportunities are also being explored. It’s the same with Interesting Engineering.
Huseyin stated that reaching a milestone like the one they did is great, but now comes the hard part- stabilizing the number of pageviews and making sure that it stays close to 1 million and grows consistently.
IE has various ideas and plans that they are looking to execute soon to remain at the top of their game:
- Huseyin told us that they had spent considerably this year to build a competent editorial team, and the team had a huge hand in the success that IE got to taste. They plan to keep this up and focus greatly on the content quality.
- As great as Facebook is working for IE, they don’t want to rely heavily on a single traffic source and will be working towards getting good traffic from other sources as well like Search.
- Another thing that IE’s team has on its agenda is improving user experience. According to Huseyin and Ekin, Core Web Vitals did some damage (which is true for many publishers out there) that needs to be taken care of. So IE will be focusing a lot on improving page experience to deal with this issue.
- An improved cookie policy will be in effect on IE’s website to keep the users’ consent rights and user experience intact. In addition to this, they are working on showing better quality ads to users, which will have a positive impact on user experience.
- Lastly, they are also thinking about introducing a Subscription model, which is also a step towards improving user engagement, user experience, and revenue generation.
In Closing
When asked about the vision that led him to create and work towards the growth of Interesting Engineering, Huseyin had some inspiring words to say:
For me, it’s passion. I love web designing, and I am an engineer. But, ultimately, it’s loving what you do. So it’s not just a job for me.
It is certainly such an attitude that has led to such a tremendous growth of IE- a passionate person with a clear vision of what they want something to be.
We want to end by congratulating Interesting Engineering’s whole team on reaching 1 million pageviews/day, which was further complemented by 11 million pageviews/month soon after!
Shubham is a digital marketer with rich experience working in the advertisement technology industry. He has vast experience in the programmatic industry, driving business strategy and scaling functions including but not limited to growth and marketing, Operations, process optimization, and Sales.