Comment by bazillion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bazillion | Hacker News Reader

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I created a completely new branch of advertising, which basically superimposes advertisements directly over images in a way that actually benefits consumers: http://pleenq.com/.

Here's a demo video (fairly old, have to still update with the latest look): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GfKBvs53Ss

Say you have a picture on a blog post showing a car engine, explaining how to fix something inside of it. You could highlight/link all the individual parts in that car to where your users can buy them on O'Reilly Auto Parts, and make a commission each time they make a purchase (affiliate marketing). I think this type of advertisement is 1) beneficial for users for its informative nature, 2) leads to bloggers being able to focus on content instead of worming offputting advertising into their blogs (such as banner ads), and 3) could lead to a more interactive internet where things in any image can be purchased or even just linked to for informative purposes[1].

[1] A video showing how my product could link to wikipedia items: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwmbBa3TPgg

Edit: I appreciate the support votes! Feel free to ask any questions you have. There's also a support forum at https://www.reddit.com/r/pleenq/ if you want to subscribe and follow the progress along as we grow.

The scenario I'm imagining is that I just want to click on the image to view a larger version, but when I click on it, instead of getting a larger version, I'm redirected through an affiliate link to buy a product. Not my desired outcome and seems like a frustrating scenario.

How does your platform account for this?

EDIT: When watching the video, I see that specific items are highlighted and not the whole image, but I still envision a lot of visitors who have no interest in determining where they should click on image in order to avoid affiliate links.

Still looks like a very neat product, however.

The interaction is dependent on the website's settings, but one of the available options (which is the default) is to show a popup that lets you know what you're navigating to, such as on http://girlpowder.net/ -- I'll be adding a store logo to this soon, so you know you're navigating to i.e. amazon.

Since some websites might want to make it only have the hover effect, I leave that up to the website to decide best for their users.

Edit: I see that you just might be referencing the main functionality of clicking on an image. If the user clicks on the image and doesn't click on a highlighted area, the functionality will default to whatever happens on that website when a user clicks on an image. A parent <a> tag, for instance, will bubble up to its href as normal.

Thank you.

Good luck with the product. Looks pretty neat.

Interesting.

This reminds me of VigLink and other players in the space that essentially sell link inventory to e-commerce companies. For example, you mention Microwave Model #3023 in a blog post, create a hyperlink, and then e-commerce companies selling Microwave Model #3023 bid on each new visit to point the destination URL to their product page.

You, my friend, are spot-on with this. It's a part of the long-term plan of PLEENQ, but requires enough market penetration to make sense.

Seems like your offering differs in that it caters to visual inventory and you can segment an image by its pixels to distinguish unique products, which is cool.

What sort of customers are using Pleenq so far?

Blogs, a couple online forums, content sites (largest one we're testing on is worldlifestyle.com -- disabled currently) and a couple sites who are building their functionality based on PLEENQ (women's lookbooks, houzz-like functionality, etc.).

It's still impossible to search for a consumer good (say, a refrigerator, or a bicycle), and quickly see what brands are available in what stores in your town, and what they have in stock. Why are so many people in advertising trying to get people to buy stuff when they are just trying to read some article on the internet, while it is still hard to actually buy stuff when you want to and your wallet is wide open?

The vast majority of advertising is very active advertising that is designed to draw your eye to something. The difference between us and them is that this only does something when you interact with the image (hovering your mouse over it). If you don't do that...it's as if it doesn't exist on the page. The state of advertising I want to get to is one where it doesn't degrade the user experience and only enhances it.

While what you're talking about sounds logical, the implementation details of having a live inventory of stores that are local to you are so infeasible, as to be completely ruled out without a huge technology overhaul backing stores. Maybe in the future. But until then, we're here now.

PM me: youruserid at myuserid dot com

This seems quite similar to what companies like GumGum are doing as well (in image adverts).

https://gumgum.com

Are you just going to use affiliate feeds or are you looking for advertisers. I am happy to test advertising for one of my clients (ecommerce home decor space).

Would love to test advertisers -- do they/you have a publisher available to test it on that makes sense? It could be a blog site that shows images about their products, or even their own home page linking to products within their catalog.

I'm always down to implement new ways to demonstrate the versatility of the product -- please email me when you get a chance (email in profile).

How has mobile use been with this concept? I could see it working well on desktop, but on smaller screens?

I actually have multiple interactions that I'm experimenting with, and the website owner chooses what interaction fits with their site design.

One of them is where the mobile user taps on the image, and all of the object highlights pop up one at a time. Tapping on a non-highlighted region hides the highlights.

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