Sell ad spaces on your website with Intravert
If a to-do checklist app and Snapchat’s streaks feature had a baby, it would be something like Makerlog, a platform used by over 2000 people to keep a tab on their daily goals and help each other stay accountable. The community is made up of developers, designers, and indie makers, among others, and has its own advertisement network through which hyper-targeted ads are displayed to its niche audience. This is made possible by Intravert, which allows online communities and blogs to monetize their content by selling customized ad spaces.
Intravert is Dominic Monn’s latest side-project. Monn is a Machine Learning engineer and has previously built Mentor Cruise — a mentorship platform that connects college grads and young professionals with experienced mentors, and RemoteML — a jobs board for remote machine learning jobs.
Intravert wants to be the alternative to existing ad distribution networks such as Google Adsense and AdPushup. It considers itself to be the ethical and privacy-friendly customized advertisements platform.
“Many bigger sites are selling their own sponsorships or ads and don’t rely on ad networks. I believe that it’s far more profitable and ethical to rely on your community for advertising, rather than an ad distribution network. I needed something like this for my other sites, so decided to build it as a standalone product.”
Dominic wanted to solve his own problem of selling ad spaces on his sites, and built Intravert himself. The side-project is the latest addition to his list of side-projects. Monn launched Intravert as a closed beta to around two dozen partners, before launching it publicly a couple of months later.
Setting up an ad page using Intravert is easy. All you have to do is enter details such as the price, duration, and description of ads that can be displayed, along with the terms, and you get an Intravert-hosted subpage where customers can book ad spaces. The free-tier plan gives access to Intravert without paying any upfront costs. This is beneficial for smaller blogs that want to monetize their content, as they will only have to pay if there is a sale. A paid upgrade of $49/month brings down the platform’s fees to 2.5% per transaction (as opposed to 7.5% with the free plan). Payments are facilitated through Stripe.
When asked about the future of Intravert, Monn says
“Ad sites and networks are always a little shady. I hope to make Intravert an ethical alternative for communities and blogs.”
Intravert is definitely on the path to reaching that goal, as Makerlog clocked in around 10 ad-space sales in two months, all hosted through Intravert.
Psst Dominic is already working on his next project. Follow him on Twitter to stay updated.
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