Apply HN: Natural advertising for small businesses and personal websites
Solution: Think affiliate marketing. Now think manual advertising contracts. This service would combine these two to get some level of automation in the process.
How would it work?
(Imagine this service is hosted at natural.com, which is obviously not true). A blogger writes about the topic of fishing for beginner fishers. He talks about things the wannabe fishers must buy and places they must go. Every time he talks about a product, he puts a link to natural.com/<product-name>, or when he talks about a place, he can use something like natural.com/<place>, maybe he can also create more complex link patterns, but let's stick to these for now. These links are going to redirect the clicker.
Advertisers would bid for these pre-placed links. Read the rest of the example at https://gist.github.com/fiatjaf/10e61297e060373fabf4ee1cc2f1ad16, because HN has a character limit. Only two paragraphs more, but doesn't matter. They key ideas are here.
Other markets where this could clearly work: food blogs; programming blogs; travel blogs; hack-your-life sites; personal development blogs; clothing and fashion blogs; any blog or site about hobbies or practices like yoga, painting, martial arts, hunting etc.
Progress: No progress at all. I realize the network-effect of this thing is damn hard to beat, but at the same time it is something that I see working in small scale, so it is probably doable.
Market: Bloggers; small business; local, non-tech small businesses. Later, big companies that sell a lot of different things, big content websites (newspapers, magazines etc.).
Team: One developer with many ideas, this one being the only one hard enough to be worth posting here.