🌟 Trialling Sponsored Listings

[adam]

I have started a trial of sponsored listings. Paid threads that will be featured on the sidebar and can circumvent our self-promotion rules. I would really value your thoughts and feedback to see if this is something that is worth sticking around.

Much like Gold memberships, any and all earnings from sponsored listings will be used to grow the Webwide community and documented in the monthly transparency reports.

Full info here:

About Sponsored Listings

Hello! This is a short trial to test some monetisation. I would appreciate feedback from any member of the community with their thoughts. Is a trade-off of some subtle relevant listings worth increased funds for platform growth? Will anybody even buy them? Let's find out! Sponsored listings are...

webwide.io

Since the info thread is locked, you can use this announcement for discussion/feedback.

This inspired by dev.to's implementation which seems to work quite well for them!

Thank you!

 

[Gummibeer]

👎 from my side. It's the opposite of what a forum is most times about. Right now the forum hasn't this much post traffic that current threads get lost and the search could get improved but finds things most times.
At the end it's a more controlled ad slot of community members content. But for me this community is about the community & network and not the ad-reach.

 

[Gummibeer]

As a thank you to our dedicated members, each 250 posts you make will earn you one sponsored listing credit. This is currently tracked manually until I work out a better system! Just skip the credit purchase and I'll take care of the rest.

Would mean that I can have two weeks of sponsored time and I only have to "spam" to get more? 🧐

 

[adam]

Really appreciate your feedback @Gummibeer.

👎 from my side. It's the opposite of what a forum is most times about. Right now the forum hasn't this much post traffic that current threads get lost and the search could get improved but finds things most times.
At the end it's a more controlled ad slot of community members content. But for me this community is about the community & network and not the ad-reach.

Fair points. I am not 100% on keeping it but the lower post counts that you have identified are part of the reason I would like to raise a small amount of extra funds. It would be nice to purchase our own ad placements elsewhere to gather some new members. I am vehemently against 3rd-party display ads which feature on almost all other free community sites (unless they run their own ad networks) and thought this is a better option than selling image ads or sponsorships.

Would mean that I can have two weeks of sponsored time and I only have to "spam" to get more? 🧐

Well spammers are banned so that wouldn't work. 😋 I thought that 250 posts per slot would be high enough that nobody just looking for ad space would go to all that effort to post crap but also be rewarding for active members to promote one of their projects/blog posts/whatever else.

 

[Gummibeer]

Something that would be an option, but could get really annoying, would be the ads/posts linked in threads by keywords. So lets say I'm a Laravel dev and write a post to get hired. Instead of simply having it only on the startpage I could also book auto-response/ad slot in threads flagged by "search for help" or in category "search for employee" and contain "laravel".
This way my ad would hit the right users and not only being placed somewhere in the wild and possibly no one of my audience will see. In this case I could image something like a "1 credit per post" and I could create a campaign with this ruleset and say that it can spend up to 5 credits and run for 2 weeks. Whatever will come first will cancel my campaign. This way I won't pay anything if no post occurs matching my rules - or better only the 1 credit for the sponsored post itself.

 

[adam]

Interesting idea! Seems that would definitely work well when we grow some more. Perhaps not as a post but some other kind of placement.

My number one priority is our own active users and I have tried to come up with something as unobtrusive as possible while still providing some value for both sides.

At least this way the widget itself has a obvious data attribute that people could block with an ad blocker!