Into-It relaunches Chrome extension to ‘bring music industry budgets to publishers’
Into-It, a UK-based start-up seeking to replace banner ads on publisher websites with personalised notifications about music artists, has relaunched its Chrome browser extension.
The new version aims to streamline its onboarding process and was designed by Lucky Generals.
Users can install it, pin it, select their favourite artists from Into-It’s list, and browse publisher partners The Guardian and The Independent to see personalised notifications, such as new album releases or tour dates.
Into-It first launched in March to offer consumers an alternative to banner advertising, which founder Lee Henshaw has derided as “a classic market of lemons, full of information asymmetry”, with “devalued, defunded” inventory that harms the user experience.
Designed with principles seeking to enable an “intention economy”, the product has been endorsed by the Association of Online Publishers, whose managing director, Richard Reeves, has called it “an exciting innovation in digital publishing”.
Nevertheless, user uptake has been relatively small, with only a few hundred downloads to date.
Product improvements
Henshaw told The Media Leader he has spent the last few months soliciting feedback on how to refine the extension. Throughout May and June, he conducted interviews with users to refine Into-It and better suit their needs.
While he relayed that general feedback was positive (“they didn’t want to go back to just having ads”), users were critical of the extension’s onboarding process, which required an email sign-up and permission to access users’ browser history, as well as “too many intermediary pages”.
“We were suffering from feature shock — we just had too many features,” said Henshaw. “So, we listened.”
The new version, which requires a separate download, is simplified and does not require any permissions to track users’ browser history. Henshaw said it is designed to be “lightweight, secure” and not to slow down browser speeds. As of the time of publication, it has nearly 200 downloads.
Upon installing the extension, users are immediately prompted to “customise your personalised notifications”, where they can explore and decide which musical artists they’d like to see information about, categorised by genre.
“What we want here is something analogous to record shopping,” Henshaw described.
Into-It launched with the ability for users to receive notifications covering 30 music artists, and that number has grown to around 150 today. It is currently adding new artists at a rate of 10-15 per week, Henshaw estimated.
The aim for the start-up will be to continue expanding not only the number of artists onboarded into the extension, but also the number of publisher partners and the overall user base.
To accomplish the latter, Into-It is planning a marketing campaign for November, aimed at targeting music fans who read The Guardian and Independent online. Henshaw hopes to have thousands of users before the end of the year.
“There is an increasing level of awareness around what we’re doing in the publishing industry,” Henshaw continued. “We haven’t wanted to add any more publishers until now; because now we’ve got this new extension, we are ready to start adding more publishers.”
From attention to intention
The project aligns with a broader goal of developing an “intention economy” online. American blogger Doc Searls, a supporter of the start-up, coined the term to describe a system that focuses on buyers of goods rather than sellers.
The philosophy is increasingly becoming mainstream. In his new memoir, Sir Tim Berners-Lee concludes by encouraging media owners and advertisers to shift their focus from the attention economy to the intention economy.
In a talk at Harvard University this month, Berners-Lee commented: “The web is being hijacked from an ‘intention economy’ to an ‘attention economy,’” adding that “the user has been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser.”
While Henshaw is starting with the music industry, he has previously told The Media Leader that he envisions Into-It providing intentional ad experiences for various industries, such as gaming or cinema.
However, for now, “we are going to continue our mission to bring music industry budgets to online news publishers,” he concluded.