17 Apr Twitter and Linket Ads
Linket founder Boudville has a patent on Hashtag, deep link and linket for more user interactions. Imagine you are looking at a web page on your phone, where there are messages or postings, all related to a hashtag. We are familiar with where the page might have ads related to that hashtag. An ad would be clickable, and leads to another web page, this time at a domain owned by the ad firm.
Now linkets give a different possibility for user engagement with ads. Suppose the hashtag is #EnglishLearn. Normally the page would have ads for tutors of English. Clicking an ad goes to another page, where you might learn from a tutor via a website, or to coordinate to meet a live tutor. We have a different take. See the figure. The page shows 3 messages posted by users asking about tutors.
Next to each message is an ad. These are shown as linkets, in enclosing square brackets. The brackets are an arbitrary choice of delimiting symbols. For message 1, someone calling himself [Tutor Bill] has an ad. The server making the page inserts these linkets. In general, the first ad position would be most favoured by advertisers.
A student Amy needs to improve her English. She searches on her phone browser and gets the page. She clicks [Kiwi Gold]. Instead of it being the usual URL that ends up with her on another webpage, the clicking triggers a download of an English tutoring app that [Kiwi Gold] has earlier picked to teach with. Amy can decline the download, in which case nothing happens. But if she agrees, the app is installed and run. It connects to the network address of an instance of the app being run in tutor mode by the tutor. Amy’s app is run in student mode. Thru the app, Amy pays the tutor, with the app taking a commission.
On the page there may be different ways to show the linket ads. There might be a linket at the top, near the hashtag. If so, this could be the most favoured position for advertisers.
If there are several linkets, the order of presentation might be by increasing cost. So [Tutor Bill] is the cheapest, followed by [Kiwi Gold].
Why is a linket an improvement over conventional ads that go to other webpages? On mobile, 80% of the time is spent in apps and 20% in the browser. The UX is considered better in apps, while a browser often means clumsy use. This also suggests that the firm making the hashtag page can charge linket advertisers more than those using normal URL ads.
We described how a normal webpage with hashtags can be modded to use linkets. If the page is a screen in a hashtag app, the app can be coded to allow for linkets being used in the above way. The hashtag firm has incentive to do this, because it charges extra to advertisers to use linkets.
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