FORUM OWNERS MAKE MONEY

I am a business man. I've been in the online space since 1982. One of our companies just made the Inc500. Here is a scenario/proposal:

I'm about to embark on adding a Nabble forum to one of my blogs. The dilemma is the ADVERTISING. Not the presence of advertising, but the fact that there is no option for me to add advertising to my own forum or at least share in the revenue generated. That's a huge problem. You will gain many novice users looking for an easy way to add a forum to their site, but you will never get any heavy hitting high traffic sites because of this shortcoming, and quite frankly you will never reach your true potential. At the end of the day most everyone realizes your need to make revenue and gain compensation for the product you have put out, but to cut off the ability of the forum owner to gain revenue from advertising while you retain this right will stifle Nabble's potential tremendously. It's simply the wrong mindset for growth.

www.newjerseyhunter.com, one of my colleagues traditional hosted forums garners 2million hits. He makes a nice income on advertising. How can I consider putting my faith in resources in Nabble without an ability to gain revenue from the traffic I build up? Sure since it's an embeded forum I could run some adsense in the sidebar, etc, but that's primitive and not optimal. It would cut ad revenue in half, not to mention redundancy with your ads within the forum.

The solution? Share revenue generated by ads within the forum with the forum owner, and/or give the forum owners some sort of customization features or ability to manage their own adsense campaigns within the site.

This will EXPONENTIALLY increase the growth and resources of Nabble?

Doesn't this make more sense? Currently you're adding advertising to the forum and other products and building up resentment from some of your followers. Wouldn't it make more sense to motivate and empower the forum owners and offer an incentive?

Here's an analogy: It's the difference between having a micromanaging sales manager that rules with an iron fist and has his salespeople work for a set salary vs. a sales manager who empowers his salespeople and rewards them with uncapped commissions based on their performance. Which would you work harder for and generate more revenue, while feeling good about the whole arrangement?

The solution is to share ad revenue with the forum owner, or give them the option to place their own adds within the forum itself, not just in the sidebars of their website.

You will attract a wealth of new users looking to generate revenue. There is no downside, everyone wins.

How about it? How quickly can you get this implemented? Without reinventing the wheel, a quick and immediate solution would be to allow an option for users to add their own adsense while you work on a more optimal solution.

Regards, Benjamin

Hi,
This is something to think about.
For now, you can pay "Remove ads" and then we can help you to put your own ads.

Hi Pedro,
I don't have a problem with your ads. I'm not interested in removing them. I'm looking to share revenue from them or if that's not possible; be able to add my own ads so that we both benefit from the traffic to my forum in this partnership. You need to be compensated for developing this great product, and I need to ensure that when my forum gets up to 2+ million hits a month that it is worth my time invested in using the Nabble Plattform. I could opt for vBulletin or another robust server side option, however Nabble is a quick and easy way to embed in every one of my affiliate websites and the only thing missing is assurance that if I invest in building up my forum, I too am able to gain revenue from my traffic via advertising. Why should only Nabble gain $ from my blog? Nabble's return will be much greater if we work "together". Thoughts?
Bjc

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Hi,
This is something to think about.
For now, you can pay "Remove ads" and then we can help you to put your own ads.

---

Hi Benjamin, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Let me explain how things work so that you can better see the big picture. First of all, Nabble does allow people to put their own ads on their apps (e.g., forums, galleries, etc.). Actually, Nabble is way more flexible than that. Our apps are built with a language called NAML that allows you to change how your pages look and work. So you can go from small customizations to entire new features and sites. The sky is the limit here. We haven't spent much time with marketing yet because this feature is still in beta, but we should get it ready for everyone in a few months.

With this in mind, implementing a feature like you suggested is complex because people will be able to change anything in their apps. At this point, if you want to remove our ads and add your own with NAML, it is not only possible but also simple. (It is extremely important to remember that this change is only allowed if the user has paid to remove our ads from his/her app -- in other words, the user should buy ad-free credits throught the menu Options > Remove ads. This is what serious users should do if they don't want to have their apps shut down).

So the value Nabble wants to bring is the ability to easily tweak apps and create things that would be hard with other CMS tools, like wordpress, etc. The feature you suggested makes more sense for rigid sites where people have limited customization options. Nabble doesn't put limits with NAML, so we should let users do what they want and we just watch and enforce our policy. Does this make sense? Please let me know what you think.

Hi Hugo,
Thanks for the response. I respect what you're working on here. It looks like a great product, and you are bringing it to market at a great time. That is a winning formula. I wish  you the best. I also want to compliment you and your team for the atttitude in professionlism I've read in many of the posts in the support forum. It looks to me as if you've answered nearly every inquiry in detail, and furthermore it looks to me like you've implemented many of the requests by the users for different functionalities.

In regard to my inquiry; i'm not sure I understand your perspective. Why can't I leave your ads and ad some of my own? Then we both share in traffic. Why is my only option to pay for removal of the ads? That doesn't seem flexible, it seems rigid; against the Nable culture no? What did you mean by the feature I requested is suitable for more rigid sites? For example if I buy a domain from godaddy and set up VBulletin on server side I am in control of my own destiny right? Full flexibility.

Nabble's selling point is easy implementation, easy management, and easy embeddability. It's an alternative to a more robust form like Vbulletin. If you approach this correctly and keep your users happy, engaged, and partners in this you will succeed greatly.

One other quick question which is off topic:  what happens if you change something in the future I'm not happy with and I have 1million posts on the forum? Is there a way to back up my site and transfer it (export) it to another option like vBulletin for example?

How can we both share in the popularity of my forums that I'm about to build using the Nabble Plattform without me having to "buy to have ads removed". I don't get that approach. It's seems silly.......kind of backwards. I pay to have ads removed, only to put my own up in place of them? Then what? On an ongoing basis I'm getting checks from google for adsense, and still cutting you checks to keep your ads off my forum? That seems kind of silly when we can both have ads on my forum or come up with a more logical workaround? Sorry I don't mean to sound condescending, I don't have all the answers; but I've spoken about this with a bunch of people in the space and we can't understand the model here. Can't you guys come up with something better that will excite your user base instead of piss them off? I read a lot of posts of people angry about the ads. What if you were to say to them hey what are you complaining about? You can make money here too!?

P.S. Where are you guys located?
Are you looking for investors?

BJ wrote

Thanks for the response. I respect what you're working on here. It looks like a great product, and you are bringing it to market at a great time. That is a winning formula. I wish you the best. I also want to compliment you and your team for the atttitude in professionlism I've read in many of the posts in the support forum. It looks to me as if you've answered nearly every inquiry in detail, and furthermore it looks to me like you've implemented many of the requests by the users for different functionalities.

Thanks a lot. We have a small team, but we try our best to keep our users happy.

BJ wrote

In regard to my inquiry; i'm not sure I understand your perspective. Why can't I leave your ads and ad some of my own? Then we both share in traffic. Why is my only option to pay for removal of the ads? That doesn't seem flexible, it seems rigid; against the Nable culture no? What did you mean by the feature I requested is suitable for more rigid sites? For example if I buy a domain from godaddy and set up VBulletin on server side I am in control of my own destiny right? Full flexibility.

Sorry, my explanation was incomplete. If you want, you can put your ads together with Nabble's. The only requirement here – and this is part of google's adsense policy – is that you cannot place more than two ads per page and  the formatting and colors of your ads must be different from ours. So now we have three possibilities:
(1) the user keeps our ads
(2) the user pays to remove our ads
(3) the user keeps our ads, and place his/her ads
(4) the user pays to remove our ads, and place his/her ads

So how would the feature you suggested work? We would have to offer several position possibilities for the ads and this would have to take into account if the user has paid to remove our ads or not. Since the user can easily tweak the HTML of his/her app (through NAML), we believe it is much simpler if we let them change the HTML pages as they want instead of creating a feature specific to handle third-party ads. If the user knows HTML, he/she should be able to make such changes without problems and have the ads running within minutes. What do you think?

BJ wrote

Nabble's selling point is easy implementation, easy management, and easy embeddability. It's an alternative to a more robust form like Vbulletin. If you approach this correctly and keep your users happy, engaged, and partners in this you will succeed greatly.

Our selling point is also extreme flexibility. Remember that NAML allows you to build complex websites by simply tweaking a forum or any other Nabble app. For example, our documentation page is a forum with some tweaks. Of course, the user must understand the NAML concepts and we still have to create more tutorials and examples.

BJ wrote

One other quick question which is off topic:  what happens if you change something in the future I'm not happy with and I have 1million posts on the forum? Is there a way to back up my site and transfer it (export) it to another option like vBulletin for example?

You can export your forum to XML format (Options > Download archives). You would probably need a small program to move the exported data into a different system.

BJ wrote

P.S. Where are you guys located?

We have a distributed team. The locations are: California, Texas and Rio de Janeiro.

BJ wrote

Are you looking for investors?

We can talk about this by email.

That works Hugo. THANK YOU!
That is exactly what I was asking about. I know basic html; enough to edit templates, embed items. and minor tweaks. Where exacly do I find the code for my forum, and how do I edit it and re-save it so as to place the code for my adsense ad next to yours?

This is perfect; we both benefit and you have another extremely satisfied user who will spread the word about Nabble and NAML.

You guys are kind, very responsive, and you have a great product. Most importantly you have an ear and open mind to your user base. If you can keep that last quality as you grow, the sky is the limit. Thanks again. Please write back about ad placement/editing html.

Bjc

Bjc

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BJ wrote

Thanks for the response. I respect what you're working on here. It looks like a great product, and you are bringing it to market at a great time. That is a winning formula. I wish you the best. I also want to compliment you and your team for the atttitude in professionlism I've read in many of the posts in the support forum. It looks to me as if you've answered nearly every inquiry in detail, and furthermore it looks to me like you've implemented many of the requests by the users for different functionalities.

Thanks a lot. We have a small team, but we try our best to keep our users happy.

BJ wrote

In regard to my inquiry; i'm not sure I understand your perspective. Why can't I leave your ads and ad some of my own? Then we both share in traffic. Why is my only option to pay for removal of the ads? That doesn't seem flexible, it seems rigid; against the Nable culture no? What did you mean by the feature I requested is suitable for more rigid sites? For example if I buy a domain from godaddy and set up VBulletin on server side I am in control of my own destiny right? Full flexibility.

Sorry, my explanation was incomplete. If you want, you can put your ads together with Nabble's. The only requirement here – and this is part of google's adsense policy – is that you cannot place more than two ads per page and  the formatting and colors of your ads must be different from ours. So now we have three possibilities:
(1) the user keeps our ads
(2) the user pays to remove our ads
(3) the user keeps our ads, and place his/her ads
(4) the user pays to remove our ads, and place his/her ads

So how would the feature you suggested work? We would have to offer several position possibilities for the ads and this would have to take into account if the user has paid to remove our ads or not. Since the user can easily tweak the HTML of his/her app (through NAML), we believe it is much simpler if we let them change the HTML pages as they want instead of creating a feature specific to handle third-party ads. If the user knows HTML, he/she should be able to make such changes without problems and have the ads running within minutes. What do you think?

BJ wrote

Nabble's selling point is easy implementation, easy management, and easy embeddability. It's an alternative to a more robust form like Vbulletin. If you approach this correctly and keep your users happy, engaged, and partners in this you will succeed greatly.

Our selling point is also extreme flexibility. Remember that NAML allows you to build complex websites by simply tweaking a forum or any other Nabble app. For example, our documentation page is a forum with some tweaks. Of course, the user must understand the NAML concepts and we still have to create more tutorials and examples.

BJ wrote

One other quick question which is off topic:  what happens if you change something in the future I'm not happy with and I have 1million posts on the forum? Is there a way to back up my site and transfer it (export) it to another option like vBulletin for example?

You can export your forum to XML format (Options > Download archives). You would probably need a small program to move the exported data into a different system.

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Hi Benjamin, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. If you want to add your ads close to Nabble's, you should follow these steps:
(1) Click on "See how NAML generates this page" link in the footer of your forum;
(2) Click on the cog dropdown, then "Search macros";
(3) Search for "show_ads" and open the first result;
(4) You can edit that macro like this:

<override_macro name="show_ads" parameters="format, class, style" requires="node_page,servlet">
    <n.overridden/>
    ...place the code of your ads here...
</override_macro>

No worries Hugo, thanks for the response. That's perfect. Is there a specific size/style ad that you suggest?
bjc

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Hi Benjamin, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. If you want to add your ads close to Nabble's, you should follow these steps:
(1) Click on "See how NAML generates this page" link in the footer of your forum;
(2) Click on the cog dropdown, then "Search macros";
(3) Search for "show_ads" and open the first result;
(4) You can edit that macro like this:

<override_macro name="show_ads" parameters="format, class, style" requires="node_page,servlet">
    <n.overridden/>
    ...place the code of your ads here...
</override_macro>

---

I think any horizontal banner should look good.

Hi ,

we use "Leaderboard" for forums.

About google size/style ad, see:
https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185666

Great thread.

BJ I had many of these same thoughts.  The CPM Nabble is charging for ad removal seems to be low enough (at least in my forum) so that you can opt out, replace ads with your own and make about 2x the cost of ad removal.  It's about a 50/50 ad split in my forum. Not too bad really.

This math is done at the 1,000,000 impression price.

Ultimately I think the publisher should get more than half, but Nabble could easy work this out by selling an even larger quantity of impressions at a lower CPM.

I agree that Nabble team is excellent. I'm paid support customer, and, in my experience, you won't find a better price for custom web dev anywhere in the world.

Wish I had the money to invest. I have certain invested a lot of time, in what might be considered beta testing.

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