StorytellerBeta — my pitch
Vertical mobile + my best engagement & ad ideas. Ask me to drop, swap, or add — but here's what I'd ship if it were my call.
Mobile vertical — three states swiping through the same feed
Full-bleed 9:16 cards. Swipe up = next, down = back. TikTok pattern. Same widget on desktop becomes a centered 320px-wide variant or the horizontal carousel from before — that's a separate decision.
↑ swipe up between cards • tap reactions on right rail • bottom dock pinned for category jumps
What I'd ship — engagement
Picked for actually moves the pageview/engagement needle, not just feature theatre. Cut anything that needs heavy infra to debut.
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1Auto-advance with thin progress bars at top — Instagram/Snap pattern. Each story gets ~6s of viewing time, then advances unless user taps to pause or swipes back. Turns the widget from passive "click if you want" into an active loop the user has to consciously exit. Massive on engagement metrics.
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2Tabbed mood switcher pinned at the bottom — Όλα / Sports / Tech / Life / Politics. Tap to filter. Drives pageviews for users who already know what they want, and the tab they pick is a personalization signal we keep across visits (cookie).
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3Right-rail reactions (😍 😢 😮) — TikTok-style. Frictionless. Each reaction logs to the analytics worker as a per-story signal we use to weight future feeds. Doesn't compete with the click target.
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4"342 reading right now" live counter — top-right pulse. Real number from a CF Worker that aggregates per-publisher pageviews on a 30s rolling window. Strong social proof, cheap to ship (you already use CF Workers).
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5Inline polls every ~5 cards — relates to the surrounding category. "Σήμερα κερδίζει: Άρσεναλ ή Ατλέτικο?" Tap to vote, see live results. Engagement is off-the-charts vs passive scroll. Polls authored by publisher (or auto-generated from trending topics — v2).
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6"Breaking" interrupt slot — if the publisher publishes anything in the last 30min flagged "breaking" (RSS category or a special endpoint), it auto-jumps to slot 1 with a pulsing red badge. Storyteller becomes the breaking-news ticker for the article.
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7Save / share rail — keep these but quiet. Save persists in localStorage (no account); share opens native share sheet on mobile, copy-link on desktop. Share is a pageview multiplier we get for free.
What I'd ship — ad formats
Today: prebid native ad spliced into stories[] at fixed position, plus support for video ad as a card. That's it. Here's where it gets interesting.
Ship in v1
- AVertical video ad as a story card — full 9:16, autoplay muted, sound on tap. Inserted every 3-4 stories. Skippable after 5s. Outstream creatives transcoded server-side to vertical if needed (we can use existing prebid native fallback when no vertical creative is supplied).
- BSponsored category tab — "Lifestyle by Nivea" — premium brand attaches to a tab. Inside that tab, native ads weighted higher. Sells as a flat-fee monthly sponsorship — bypasses programmatic auction entirely. New revenue stream.
- CReward video — "Watch a 15s video to keep reading 5 more stories" gate. Standard mobile-game pattern, fits the auto-advance loop perfectly. Premium CPM for completed views.
Defer to v2 / explore
- DInline poll-as-ad — "[Brand] asks: which color do you prefer?" looks like our regular poll, drives intent and brand recall. Higher CPM than display, novel format.
- EShoppable stories — for fashion/lifestyle publishers, articles get product tags inside storyteller. Affiliate commission. Limited inventory but high margin.
- FCompanion banner during video — small static banner appears next to/below the video card while it plays. Tested format on connected TV, untested in storyteller-style.
- GBranded weather/sports widget — "Καιρός brought to you by [Brand]" auto-plays a 3s pre-roll before a weather/sports card in those categories.
Your turn — react to this pitch, don't curate it
Tell me: which of the 7 engagement ideas + 3 v1 ad formats are wrong / too gimmicky / missing the point? What did I miss? Which terrify the publishers we work with? I'll iterate from there.
Especially: the auto-advance loop is the boldest call — if Greek news publishers think it's "too TikTok" or competes with their own article reading, that's a cut.