

URX (YC S13) Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Into Ecommerce Apps - jmilinovich
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/16/urx-ads?utm_campaign=hn&utm_medium=ns&utm_source=me

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smoyer
I see a bunch of comments on how useful this is, but I just uninstall
applications that have ads that are intrusive. I'd love to get back to the
point where I could buy software and pay the developers to make a living.
Apparently everyone thinks they need to be Google now (ad supported).

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madeofpalk
Advertisers are willing to pay more than users.

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smoyer
Perhaps ... or maybe most applications aren't worth real money to consumers?
I'm not trolling and as a professional software (and hardware) developer, I'm
concerned that the perception free applications give users is that they have
no monetary value. This is dangerous.

Yes ... I use and contribute to open-source projects, primarily libraries,
frameworks and developer tools. Does this make me a hypocrite?

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goeric
How would this work if the user didn't already have the app it's deeplinking
to? Like if an ad in Pandora took me to a page in Hotel Tonight but I didn't
have Hotel Tonight installed, then what?

Also, seems like a feature that could be added to one of the more popular in-
app ad services without too much effort.

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jmilinovich
URX's ads are only shown to users who already have a given app installed. If a
user uninstalls an app and sees a deeplink ad before our systems refresh, they
will be directed to the app store on click.

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ollysb
Sounds very interesting, couple of questions:

1) Have you thought about falling back to the advertiser's website if the app
isn't installed?

2) Will the link scheme be made available and if so will it be possible to
link to apps from within web pages?

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jmilinovich
1- Definitely. this is something we can easily accommodate, depending on the
advertiser's preferences (ex: mobile only vs. mobile second companies)

2- We've built our own link creator (see footer link on site) to make it easy
to learn about other apps' url schemes and create links into their apps. these
links can be used from anywhere, including the web. We're adding apps
consistently, so let us know if there are any that aren't already there.

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rst
Looking around the web site, it's a little hard to figure out what their
Android story is. On the one hand, their developer info is about only their
iOS library, and explicit references to Android elsewhere are ... not
prominent. On the other hand, on Android, apps have been able to "claim" URLs
for a while now. (The Twitter, YouTube, and Google Maps apps routinely offer
to display URLs on the corresponding web sites, if they're present.)

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jmilinovich
Deeplinking has been supported on Android since the beginning via Android
Intents. Our ads work for both Android and iOS, and we are currently finishing
our Android Turnpike library.

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diminish
so URX is mainly solving the iOS deficiency of not having a deep-linking
structure similar to Android Intents, isn't it?

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callmeed
This is pretty smart, especially with location-specific apps like
HotelTonight. I'm assuming an ad-serving app could pass along my location and
then display an ad for a hotel room in _that city_.

It's stuff like this that Groupon should be doing/looking at if they want to
become relevant again.

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the_watcher
Living Social agrees with you

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tlack
I see why this is super useful, but won't this functionality make more sense
at the iOS level, as part of their standard API and with full support in the
XCode environment? All apps should be able to deep dive into other apps, with
certain rules attached.

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madeofpalk
Well, providing the app wants to support it, there already is a mechanism
using url schemes. I'm assuming turnpike uses these?

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jmilinovich
yes, that is correct.

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zaroth
It sounds like it would depend a lot of 3rd party tracking cookies. But how's
that work with Safari in iOS defaulting 3rd party cookies to off?

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jmilinovich
Apps don't use cookies but rather Apple IDFA and Android ID. This is one of
the biggest differences between the app world and the web world.

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mikejarema
Are there any sites which list the deep-linking schemas for popular apps? Or
where app developers can share their schema for others to use?

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jmilinovich
We've built a free link generator
([http://www.urx.com/about/urx_links](http://www.urx.com/about/urx_links))
that helps expose schemas for apps that we know about. Please contact us
(team@) with any that we're missing.

[http://schemes.zwapp.com/](http://schemes.zwapp.com/) also has a ton of
schemas, but is a bit unorganized and not completely reliable.

