Online advertising is broken, especially for small or local businesses. You either pay a fortune to giants like Google and Meta for questionable "engagement", or you try to work with niche influencers, which has a whole different set of challenges, not the least of which is that it's hard to scale.
I've been working on IncentivizeThis to create a more direct and (hopefully) authentic alternative. The idea is to connect businesses with content creators in specific communities (both local and online) that are uniquely suited to meet the businesses' advertising requirements.
Imagine a local coffee shop wanting more buzz. They partner with us to sponsor a bounty like: "$10 for every Reddit post in r/YourCity that mentions our new espresso blend and gets 10+ upvotes." A member of the community sees this, writes a genuine post they might have made anyway, and gets paid for it. This creates a hyper-local, word-of-mouth ad network where businesses get what they pay for, and creators are rewarded for their genuine influence. Obviously this could be used for less wholesome purposes, but being the bounty gatekeeper, I'd like to think that we can mitigate this.
Under the hood, the platform is designed to be robust and automated. Bounties are managed as long lived, stateful workflows using Temporal. An LLM performs the content assessment, and creators are paid out instantly in USDC on Solana. Finding the right opportunity is also easy thanks to a semantic search feature for active bounties.
The goal is to build a more effective advertising mechanism for businesses and a new monetization channel for creators. I'd love to get the HN community's feedback on the idea and the execution.
You can check it out at the link above, or if you want to poke around the tech stack, the GitHub is [here](https://github.com/brojonat/affiliate-bounty-board).
