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Comment by edwinespinosa09 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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