Apply HN: Alternative to Advertisement | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Alternative to Advertisement

4 pointsmorirb8 comments

Advertisement works very well for the status quo that has lot's of money to spend on advertisement.

Wouldn't be awesome for new small companies to be able to focus less on advertisement and more on the product?

How? By having an online listing of products with tagging and up-/down-voting.

For example, imagine a new smartphone manufacturer creates a new awesome smartphone.

Instead of spending money on advertisement, the new smartphone company would publish its new smartphone on this online listing. Let's call this online listing "listing-platform.com". Then the following would happen:

1. Because the smartphone is new it gets on the landing page of listing-platform.com

2. Because the smartphone is awesome it gets lot's of upvotes by the community (Similarly to news on Hacker News)

3. In the future when users are going to look for a smartphone, they will see this smartphone because of its upvotes and good reviews.

This "popularity boost" could eventually be good enough to market new products. Without the need of advertisement.

Product Hunt is similar and it's quite nice. That said Product Hunt's focus is on the consumer side. The focus here is on the producer side. The goal here is to allow companies to market new products without the need of advertisement.

Feel free to comment negatively

Great idea -- good products should sell themselves. :D

UX-wise, I think it'd be engaging if the format would be like 9gag where there'd be popular/hot/new pages. Also, it might be take a while to deal with the poster/voter chicken and egg thing. How about also integrating the product's engagement via various channels (quora, stackshare, fb, tw, ig) but focusing more on the engagement metrics than the vanity popularity metrics? Like a Klout for products. :D

thanks!

I agree; 1. a "new stuff section" is super important, 2. measure popularity via engagement (although I'd use upvotes for that), 3. allow users to share via fb/tw/... .

As for the chicken egg problem; I guess focusing on a small industry first would help. Actually, why not make Nyolk focus on sneakers first? There is a community of people that are obsessed with sneakers and they would love such platform. The word would spread quickly in that community. They eventually would become the first core community to contribute to Nuyolk.

I'm excited to see what Nuyolk becomes! We can keep in touch:)

(for readers curious to know what Nyolk is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441834)

Other feedback on the general idea to offer an alternative to advertisement?:)

Would there be limitations on who can post? for example product hunt has a member community that is allowed to post, and an even more exclusive community that can "pin things" to the front page directly.

I imagine that this idea would get the company short term traction when first posted. How would they maintain traction without advertising as their posting slips in the rankings?

1. I'd rather go democratic than "elitist": e.g. it would be nice if a post gets deleted because a majority wants it deleted and not because of moderators. That said, "even more exclusive community that can pin things" is actually nice because it increases the motivation of this "more exclusive community" to contribute.

2. I often ask myself that. Some thoughts;

- Not only can users see the popular stuff of the last few days but also of the last month, 6 months, 3 years, etc... Effectively "smoothing" this "slipping" you describe.

- With tagging, slipping is less a problem; even though a product has slipped in the general ranking it can still be on top in certain tags.

Thanks for the comment, what do you think of the overall idea?

> I'd rather go democratic than "elitist" [...]

It's nice in theory, but what is your plan to combat sockpuppets, meatpupets, shills, astroturfing, voting rings brigading, spammers, ...

Advertisements (specifically online advertisements) are used by companies looking to reach their target market. For example, fantasy sports sites advertise on ESPN.com because a lot of sports fans go there.

How will you get sports fans to visit listing-platform.com?

Thanks for the comment.

With the tagging system: they would look for the "sport" tag.

(Actually it wouldn't be a tag because sport is a "top-level-tag". Instead it would be a category with a dedicated website. So the users would go on sports.listing-platform.com and then be able to select tags like "football", "soccer", etc.)

and if a user is looking for fantasy sport websites, then they would lookup the tag "fantasy-sport". The fantasy sport website would publish itself on listing-platform.com under the tag "fantasy-sport".

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