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Show HN: Drive traffic when sharing 3rd party content on social media

linkplugapp.com

A screenshot or video will help a lot. I registered and created an ad and still didn't know what the website/service is for. Why doesn't the homepage say it's a link shortener that adds an interstitial with a 15 second countdown and then link to the target page?

In your HN comment you write "Solution: Embed “interstitial” ad space into 3rd party content (e.g. http://lnkplg.co/RGPp)" Perfect, write that on your homepage including the link.

Yeah that definitely makes sense. The reason we haven't put much work into the homepage is we are not focusing on consumers or even SMB, instead focusing on bigger brands and influencers who will create a pleasant interstitial UX. Those types of clients are white glove and are dealt with personally by us.

Any thoughts on the interstitial experience?

Hi, guys im co-founder of this project, here's a summary

Problem: Sharing 3rd party content on social, despite relevance or value, does not yield a positive ROI for influencers.

Hypothesis: If an influencer had full-control of an interstitial ad space then they would be incentivized to share more 3rd party content

Solution: Embed “interstitial” ad space into 3rd party content (e.g. http://lnkplg.co/RGPp)

Current Stage: Building case studies with highly visible social accounts with a focus on improving public facing UX.

Remote Team: 1 full-stack dev (Tampa, FL) 1 sales/hustler (DeLand, FL)

Kevin & ShowHN: We realize our website and dashboard need work, however, we feel improving our interstitial ad’s Atarimae Hinshitsu (function) and Miryokuteki Hinshitsu (enchantment) is paramount.

Any advice on demo UI/UX would be appreciated! Demo: http://lnkplg.co/RGPp

I'm not sure I really get what is going on, or how it's different than other ads that I'm shown before I get to the content I was looking for. Can you break it down for me into some simpler language?

UX/UI wise, the loading indicator at the top is good. The scrolling is a little laggy. I think it would be hard to read all the content and figure out what is going on in ~20 seconds.

Thanks for the feedback!

usually the ads that you are normally shown are done by big news sites (example: https://hbr.org/2014/12/the-art-of-aggressive-social-sharing)

however when you use our software the people that are sharing the news articles or blogs can ad their own ad to get more value from sharing news/content to their audience on social.

When you say "it would be hard to read all the content and figure out what is going on in ~20s" are you referring to someone having to process to much info like the text at the top of the loading bar plus the advertisement that is being shown (like this donation page: http://lnkplg.co/RGPp )?

Maybe a solution would be to try and shorten the text describing the article that the user is proceeding to?

Interesting. I like the idea, but isn't this pretty similar to "bre.ad"? -- as far as I know, they weren't able to turn it into a viable business and the Yahoo! acquisition was an acquihire.

yes we use the interstitial experience like bre.ad however if im not mistaken this was used from mainly for publishers like say Techcrunch sharing their own content?

We are trying to incentivize sharing other peoples content as it pertains to your niche.

example: Hillary clinton (user) -> shares news article from Politico about her policies -> before getting to article you see a donation page.

(would look like this http://lnkplg.co/RGPp)

I saw the interstitial example. It looks slick. I think Bre.ad was for influencers, too. Do you know what didn't work for them and what you are doing differently? Are people able to make enough for you to take a cut or fee?

great question, there was some debate on whether or not they were making significant revenue.

we are trying to monetize this by not doing a SaaS model but instead an agency model where we would handle most all the work to then be able to charge a premium to these influencers.

Pretty neat!

However, I think there might be a tiny bit too much friction in using it.

First, I have to remember how to get to your app again. Then I have to login. Then I have to paste a link in a box, & then I get another link that I take somewhere else.

I'm probably not going to remember your app until I'm about to post something into a social network somewhere else, & I'm not sure how much anticipated-friction I would tolerate in that situation.

Maybe a chrome extension would be neat down the road, or maybe if I could prepend something like <user-name>.plug.to/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063441

It's really interesting though! You should keep working on it!

yeah I see what you mean, we built an oauth signup option in v1.0 that we might bring back that allows you to just automatically "switch" the links you post.

We also have the chrome extension on deck ;)

So no major issues with the public facing UI/UX in your opinion? example: http://lnkplg.co/RGPp

The widget itself is pretty slick (for the final end-user), and the Chrome extension is probably too much effort on your part to justify building at this point. OAuth helps, but it would only reduce friction for first-time users.

Personally I'm having a hard time understanding the use case from the demo alone - at least not we'll enough to intelligently comment. That plus I'm not familiar with the problem domain.

This is an interesting feature for content and brand marketing.

The url might be challenging for audiences. Is there a way to use our own shortners (ie mybrand.com/RGPp) so this whole service is white label?

We can completely white-label the service for large clients.

The only alternative domain currently available in our public facing proof-of-concept is poli.link. You can sign up with this link to create an account using the poli.link domain: http://poli.link

So that's the only current domain but any short link domain can probably be purchase by say godaddy and integrated I presume

Yes. Shoot me an email if you're interested in setting it up (Brian at LinkPlugapp.com)

Definitely that is very simply for us to do.

We actually offer additional branding by being able to give you a custom sub domain to use on the interstitial page.

Branding example (nike): 1) on social media someone clicks ni.ke/hY7j 2) they are taken to the interstitial page which is neverquite.nike.com 3) then they can go to article or nike's site

Any other branding opportunities we might have missed?

This seems to certainly have some marketing potentially. But I can also see it getting abused. If someone seems to be more spammy than just provided more value (ie coupons, emails, etc). I would love to see it in the hands of someone with a large following. I wonder what percentage of people would click in so to speak.

What would you say is the hardest part about initially implementing this is?

we definitely can see how the average consumer could use this for ill purposes which is why we haven't marketed this product to the public.

We have a public facing product for our personal use and for quality feedback, like that from the HN community ;)

Finding users who will use this software in an quality manner is our main goal, showing that these interstitials can be used to add a lot of value (limited time offers, events, AMA's, periscope/meerkat notifications etc.)

Implementing this product is really easy because we are essentially a short linking service.

1) find a 3rd party article 2) designate what you want display (e.g. landing page, kickstarter page etc.) 3) generate the short link and share it

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