Apture and Kiw.is = URL shortening with a twist – Blog – Apture.com
blog.apture.comMy reaction to redirect pages is always the same: "What? Oh." finds and clicks the skip ad button. So I don't really understand why sites bother with them.
Does anyone know of any metrics as to what percentage of the time that "skip" link is clicked? Does anyone know of any eyeball tracking studies to see how often people look immediately top right for that link?
I just can't believe those landing pages are of much value, but then I doubt I'm a typical user.
Those are all good points and questions.
I think it also relies on the actual message in the content of the page. If that content is actually good, people will want to look at it. The percentage that the content is good? That's the question. Probably not too many.
Great to see Apture and Kiw.is coming together. Huge fan of both products.
Thanks! Apture is actually really powerful and adds a lot to content (even automatically). I played with it at http://www.apture.com/create/ before implementing it into Kiwis.
Here's the example link from the post: http://kiw.is/5q
Yay link-jacking?
I'll send a memo to my squad of social media engine search optimization experts.
not link jacking, it's putting a message before the redirect. You're still redirected to the original page. One way to think of it is a reverse twitter, instead of a message with a link, it's a link then a message.
It seems you work on Kiw.is so I'm not sure if I should even try to articulate why I find your product to be annoying.
It's unfortunate that you'd like to tell us what annoys you, rather than being constructively supportive. Hacker News is a community where hackers get together and support one another, being blunt about feedback is one. Talking about personal annoyances does not fit in to what this community is all about.
I'm thinking I'm misunderstanding you, but if you have any feedback, we'd love to hear it. If it just plain annoys you, that's fine as well. If you don't mean it personally, I won't take it that way.
Interstitial pages with ads on websites are annoying enough, but this is taking it to a new level. When I (and I'd suspect lots of others) click a link, I'd like to be taken directly to that resource.
In fact, a day or two back there was a story posted to HN that went to a kiw.is link. My gut reaction was, "WTF, where's the article. Oh there it is. Wait?! That was a 3rd party interstitial? Whoever submitted that link is a jerk and a half."
So I guess what it boils down to is that I believe anyone who knowingly inserts an interstitial that could otherwise be avoided is a jerk and a half. Though, that's probably your target market; new media douchers for lack of a better term.
Blunt? Ok.
It's bad for users.
What kind of users? Do you have more feedback on that end? Thanks!
Are you serious?
you think a 10 second holding page is good?
if it has good content. it would suck to get spammers or advertisers using it only, similar to following a Twitter user who's just spamming. But then there are the twitter accounts you like. It definitely can't mitigate all awful content. You're also getting these links from people you know hopefully.