FORUM OWNERS MAKE MONEY

Posted by BJ on
URL: https://support.nabble.com/FORUM-OWNERS-MAKE-MONEY-tp7190033.html

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