— Content platform · AI · Live
Daily Yarn — an AI newsroom built to go viral.
Autonomous AI satirical news platform, engineered to turn social shares into traffic, traffic into an owned audience — and automated self-serve advertising that turns both into revenue.
At a glance
Status
Live · dailyyarn.co.nz
Stack
Laravel · AI · Web push · Forge
Type
Shareable content platform
My role
Founder, designer, sole developer
The brief.
Build a satirical NZ news site that runs itself, spreads through social sharing, converts one-off readers into a returning audience the owner controls — and monetises that audience without a sales team, ad ops, or an agency on retainer.
The build.
Autonomous newsroom
AI generates the articles, with recurring reporter characters and an automatically assembled daily front page.
Engineered for the share
Hyper-local satire tuned for the "tag a mate" moment, seeded into community channels where NZ humour actually travels.
Retention without re-acquisition
A retention engine — web push plus email digest — so readers come back for free instead of paying to reach them again.
Automated self-serve advertising
An advertiser pastes their website URL. AI reads the business, writes four on-brand ad variants sized for real inventory slots, and serves them after human moderation — no agency, no Canva marathon, no account manager.
— Major feature
The ad stack.
Paste a URL. Get four ads. Pick one, pay, go live. The whole flow is automated — from creative generation through slot-aware copy to checkout and serving.
-
01
Paste your URL
We read the public site — title, offer, imagery, tone. Thin site? We still draft from the business name and category.
-
02
AI writes four variants
Benefit, local, offer, and cheeky angles — each fitted to real slot character limits (leaderboard, MRec, in-feed, sponsor strip).
-
03
Pick one and pay
Choose the variant, select a tier ($99–$799/week founding rates), checkout. Every ad is human-reviewed before it serves.
-
04
Go live
Creative runs in the slot purchased — sidebar MRec, homepage leaderboard, in-article feed, or sponsor stripe. Advertisers get a portal with live preview.
The engine is publisher-agnostic: the same URL-in, variants-out stack can power satire, news, or community sites under licence.
Problems we solved.
The interesting engineering wasn't the headline generator — it was making anonymous traffic stick, making shares measurable, and turning pageviews into revenue without hiring ad ops.
Monetising without a sales team
Display advertising usually needs an agency, a designer, and someone manually trafficking creatives into slots. We built a self-serve flow where a local tradie or cafe owner pastes their URL and gets four ready-to-run ads in seconds — sized for our actual inventory, not a generic banner template.
Retaining anonymous readers
No login, no account — just a reader who landed from a Facebook share. We needed a way to bring them back without asking for an email address on first visit.
Escaping the Meta audience trap
Social platforms rent you reach. We built owned push and email channels so Daily Yarn controls the relationship — not an algorithm.
iOS web-push constraints
Safari requires a home-screen install before push works. We handled that gracefully — clear prompts, no dead ends, no broken promises.
Share-ready OG images
Every article gets a generated Open Graph image at publish time, plus share tracking — so we know what's travelling and can lean into it.
Full attribution
UTM tracking and Meta Pixel wired in from day one, so paid seeding and organic shares are both measurable.
Under the hood.
- Autonomous AI article generation
- Recurring AI reporter personas
- Auto-assembled daily front page
- Self-serve automated advertising (URL → four AI variants)
- Slot-aware ad copy (leaderboard, MRec, in-feed, sponsor strip)
- Human moderation queue before ads go live
- Tiered placement checkout with founding advertiser rates
- Advertiser portal with live creative preview
- Per-article Open Graph image generation
- Social share tracking
- Web push notifications (lock-screen delivery)
- Email digest
- UTM + Meta Pixel attribution
- Built on Laravel, deployed on DigitalOcean via Forge
The thesis.
Shareable content is an advertising platform: virality → traffic → owned audience → revenue.
Daily Yarn proves both halves — the content engine that spreads, and the automated ad stack that monetises it. Repeatable, not a one-off stunt.
Related service and reading
— We build these. Dori Media — Christchurch.
Want a content engine or shareable platform for your business?
Let's talk.