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

9 points| edwinespinosa09 | 10 years ago |linkplugapp.com | reply

20 comments

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[+] mtmail|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] edwinespinosa09|10 years ago|reply
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?

[+] edwinespinosa09|10 years ago|reply
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

[+] futhey|10 years ago|reply
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!

[+] FajitaNachos|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ajones05|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] michaelZejoop|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] ironsides|10 years ago|reply
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?

[+] edwinespinosa09|10 years ago|reply
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?

[+] brianpetro_|10 years ago|reply
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

[+] tylercarlson|10 years ago|reply
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?

[+] edwinespinosa09|10 years ago|reply
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