“The Internet is dead. The Internet remains dead. And we have killed it.”

A bit dramatic? Maybe. But let’s be honest, online advertising is broken. For most businesses, especially smaller ones, the options are bleak. You can pour your budget into the coffers of giants like Google and Meta for clicks and “engagement” that often feel disconnected from real results. Or, you can navigate the complex world of influencer marketing, which is difficult to measure, hard to scale, and often comes with its own set of authenticity problems.

What if there was another way? A way to get genuine mentions in the online communities where your potential customers are already having conversations?

I’ve been working on a project called IncentivizeThis to create a more direct and, I hope, authentic alternative. The idea is simple: connect businesses directly with “bounty hunters” — members of online communities who can create authentic content that meets specific advertising goals.

IncentivizeThis handles all the logistics of running a bounty program: we provide a sleek searchable board for bounty discovery, we assess content against bounty requirements, and we also handle payouts to customers as well as refunds of unclaimed funds back to the sponsor businesses.

Word-of-Mouth on Demand⌗

Imagine a local coffee shop that wants to create some buzz around its new espresso blend. Instead of buying a forgettable banner ad, they can use IncentivizeThis to sponsor a bounty:

$10 for every Reddit post in r/YourCity that mentions our new espresso blend and gets 10+ upvotes.

A local Redditor and coffee lover (a bounty hunter) sees this offer. They weren’t planning to post about their morning coffee at the favorite local spot, but now they have an incentive. They write a genuine post, share their thoughts, and if it meets the bounty’s criteria, they get a nice little reward from the business. Even better, they get paid ridiculously fast in USDC with just a Solana wallet.

This approach creates a win-win: the coffee shop receives authentic, hyper-local promotion that resonates within the community, while creators are compensated for their influence. Better yet, unlike a fleeting ad, this genuine content becomes a lasting digital asset, continually attracting new customers long after the post is made.

See It In Action⌗

Here’s a quick walkthrough showing how this works in practice. Let’s say I want to make the Internet a happier, more welcome place. To help make this happen, I’ve created a bounty that pays out to anyone who makes a positive comment on a hobbyist subreddit. In reality, you can be as stringent or as vague as you want with your requirements; get creative! You can also use the “harden” button to get back an AI generated set of requirements that should be hardened against common bounty loopholes.

Supported Platforms⌗

We’re currently live on Reddit, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, HackerNews, and TripAdvisor, supporting various content formats like posts and comments. We are continuously expanding our platform support. A key priority on our roadmap is developing robust image analysis to move beyond the basic thumbnail support we offer today.

How It’s Built⌗

For the technically curious, here’s a peek under the hood. The platform is built to be robust and automated:

First the cool stuff:

  • Bounties are managed as long-lived, stateful workflows using Temporal.
  • Content assessment is handled by an LLM (actually, a few of them), which verifies that content meets the bounty’s requirements.
  • Payments are sent out instantly to bounty hunters in USDC on the Solana blockchain for fast, cheap transactions.
  • Discovery is powered by semantic search, making it easy for bounty hunters to find relevant and interesting opportunities.

Here’s the more boring stuff (still cool IMO):

  • Backend: A Golang API server backed by PostgreSQL.
  • Frontend: A Flutter-based Single Page Application deployed on Vercel, with plans for native mobile support (thanks Flutter).

What Do You Think?⌗

The ultimate goal of IncentivizeThis is to build a more effective advertising mechanism for businesses and a new, fair monetization channel for creators and community members. It’s an experiment in rewiring a small piece of the internet’s ad economy to be more direct, transparent, and authentic.

I’d love to get your feedback on the idea and the execution. You can poke around the tech stack and see how it all works on GitHub.

Check out the IncentivizeThis backend here and the IncentivizeThis frontend here.

Finally, if you’re interested in becoming a modern day bounty hunter, here’s a more in depth walkthrough showing you how to speed through the onboarding process and start claiming bounties of your own!