People use us over Bitly because they earn rewards. What we know from the feedback we've received is users don't like seeing blatant ads (ex. banners) on the page. Our response has been to syndicate other content the user has shared; so far the design has received a some praise and nobody has complained (whereas w/ ads we received complaints), but the change hasn't been live for long (less than a month ago we were showing ads).
The money in a publisher deal flows opposite of the direction you described. They would pay us to get their content syndicated on the interstitial. From my limited knowledge, ad sales for bigger publishers start from 10k and go up, which means we need to guarantee (at $1 CPM) 10M impressions. Currently the service does about 3M monthly impressions, so we're not quite there yet.
I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive than blatant ads.
What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.
The money in a publisher deal flows opposite of the direction you described. They would pay us to get their content syndicated on the interstitial. From my limited knowledge, ad sales for bigger publishers start from 10k and go up, which means we need to guarantee (at $1 CPM) 10M impressions. Currently the service does about 3M monthly impressions, so we're not quite there yet.