jantric

Hi All, A couple of days ago I posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525481 ) about a news summarization web app. I got some comments but not a whole lot of feedback.

The web app is accessible at https://reveal-app.net

In my small online ad placement I got a click-through rate of 1.3% and reasonable engagement based on the amount of time spent on the website. (I have analytics to track some usages). Also anecdotally folks have said they like the concept. Also there are other services for news summarization which are monetized using ads or subscriptions. So there does seem to be a market needs.

I would really appreciate any advice on what the best strategy to increase awareness for this service. i.e. Should I continue to focus on paid online ads or pivot to some sort of social media marketing using influencers etc. As this is an essentially free service and without any advertisements for monetization, I can't really spend a lot for marketing.

Thanks for reading. --Jantric

Hello Hacker News Community, I have created a website/application for aggregation and summarization of the latest news articles (https://reveal-app.net). How it works: It is a simple concept really. The backend grabs the news content (uses RSS) and then passes it through an LLM to create a summary of the news. The front end web app allows viewing the summaries. It’s built using NodeJS / NestJS for backend, Angular for the frontend. It’s hosted using Firebase and GCP, and uses Gemini Vertex AI for the LLM.

Why I built it: Basically today there is just so much information, It’s hard to keep up. Many reputable news publications are now behind paywalls. It’s impractical to have news subscriptions to multiple publications. And news publications always seem to have a particular viewpoint. So it is difficult to get different viewpoints. And even If you really make an effort to go to different news sites, the whole ecosystem of online advertising and tracking makes the experience highly unsatisfactory (to me atleast). So I built this application to summarize the latest news from a variety of sources. You can read the summary and then decide if it's worth your time to go to the original article. So hopefully much fewer click baits. My target audience is folks who want to efficiently catch up with the latest goings on.

What I am looking for: Any feedback positive or negative. Any suggestions on how to increase awareness in a cost effective manner. If it is even worth trying to increase awareness too. Please let me know what you think.

– Jantric