17 year old Africans build a platform to connect your website to the world

A problem with these sort of sites is that you're associating your business with another business that could easily be competing with your own, or worse be something that affects the image of your business (for example race hate, pornography).

The other problem is that why would a website use this service? Because they have low traffic; how many low traffic websites are there? Millions. So you're going to be competing with millions of other (potentially crappy) websites to get your advert on... a potentially crappy low traffic website, one that will probably not be related to yours in any way. The traffic will be of no real value, someone making a blog about fashion reviews isn't going to want traffic from a website that sells potatoes.

I assume the basic idea is they sell it for such a small price ($2.95/m) that most people will sign up and then not really care if it doesn't work all that great, if they have a million customers they're going to make a substantial amount of revenue even if their value to customers is non-existent.

I don't understand is it some kind of link exchange that you have to add some html markup to your website? And also pay a monthly fee? I didn't understand that from the video.

Also, what are the estimates of traffic you're going to get? Is it connected how many times you show other people's ads on your site etc?

And what does the 17 year old Africans have to do with the link? It's not a news article about their success story but their product. (I assume)

I think you could have made the effort of introducing the gentlemen as _South_ Africans.

The title seems contemptuous, to me.

This is a great example of using marketing to reach the front page of HN, not an example of a great service. The service is little more than fresh paint (and a monthly fee) on an old business model that's been proven time and again not to convert well.

So is this just a link exchange scheme? I fail to see the value they add. Their platform doesn't provide a a like-for-like hit rate, so wouldn't this just attract a bunch of low-traffic sites?

This is a great concept. The problem isn't that they didn't implement the concept in the most effective way but they didn't actually implement it in any way. Traffic is just traffic that wastes your bandwidth. Targeted traffic is whats not just important but fundamental.

Thought this would be a way to SMSify your web-based service to reach developing markets. I was disappointed when I found out what it actually was.

congrats fellow south africans, but would be a much better story had you guys done the development yourselves instead of oursourcing to india.

more detail here: http://www.techcentral.co.za/pretoria-schoolboys-in-ad-shari...