Pay my users to post on my forum - is it a good idea?

Hi guys

I'm working on a celebrity web site, and I plan to add a forum under each celebrity.
Now, the big problem with forums is that you don't get many people to post at the beginning - and people don't post on it if they don't see posts on it (the usual chicken and egg problem...)

So, my idea is to pay a small amount (0.10$ ?) when a registered user posts on a forum.

First of all: is this a good idea?

Secondly, this thing needs to be checked and controlled quite closely, so I would like to do it like this:
- a user has to "apply" to this thing (that is, if he doesn't apply he posts "for free")
- a paid post has to be at least 300 chars long (to prevent people making money just by replying "I agree")
- users cannot create more than 3 paid posts per day per each celebrity, and in any case no more that 20 posts per day
- every month I check all the paid posts that each user has made, and then I authorize only the ones that I think are on topic and useful (news, interesting things about the celebrity, ...)
- I then pay only the authorized posts

What do you think about this? Let me know, as I really value DP users opinion...

 

I've never started a forum but it's like you said, you need to have some incentive to get things going. I've seen new forums try different things like paying you some of the adsense on the page if you're the last poster or something and giving the top x number of posters a link on the homepage which has a good pr. It sounds like you've got the controls in place too although 300 characters may lead to many long-winded answers when shorter ones would suffice.

 

This is usually a bad idea in the long term as it will reduce the quality of the post as people will just ramble on to get to the 300 character limit. But it can be used very effectively in the short term to get traffic and users to your site. Keep in mind that these users will leave when you discontinue paying for posts.

 

Your reply was 461 characters long - and it didn't seem long-winded to me...

I just would like to avoid people earning money with too short answers - I'd like them to ost interesting stuff

 

That's why I'll pay only posts that I will find interesting - I'll try to be as fair as possible and people, knowing that they won't get money for crap, will post on-topic stuff.

Beside this, as you said, this is a short-term technique: once the forums get going I shouldn't have the need to pay people to post.

 

It can be a great way to get things going. You can also let people like us plug our sites via links to post on your site

 

Yeah, this is also a good idea: let users add their "signature" (that is, links to their web sites) only with paid posts... Sounds good, eh?

 

I didn't say that long posts are always long-winded. I was referring to people dragging out their answers for the sole purpose of getting it counted. It's a good idea in general to not give credit for things like 'ya, i agree' or whatever. Another forum I post at has a 100 character minimum but maybe it will work with 300 chars, just sounded a little high to me.

 

there should be no limits on number of posts per day . however you must validate posts manually to check if its worth payment or not . however 300 characters is not a good idea because some posts really need not to be that long but quite significant

 

wouldn't it be better to offer the same as DP forums? we get our ads shown if we start treads and google is the one paying us.
win-win situation

 

This is a good solution: the only drawback is that only people with a Google AdSense account would be able to do it, and these kind of people are more keen to visit a forum like DP than the one I'd like to promote (that's about celebrities...)

 

Another idea for attracting users to the forum (it's a slight variation of the AdSense revenue sharing model, it can be "used" also by users who don't have a Google account): every time a topic receives more than 10 replies (from 10 different users), the original poster gets 1$.

How about that?

Cheers everybody!

 

"Money can buy everything but not anything", I dont think paying for posts would be a good idea.

 

most posts in forums are not 300+ characters long, this would lead to novels rather than threads.

 

Hi picouli,
i did this exact technique for one of my forums and i have to say i had bad experience with such stunts.
I got people signing up and start spamming all over the place

A second stunt i did was i created a little contest: "The member with the highest post @ day x wins $100" --> same thing here: all members started to spam and place useless posts and threads.
Resulting in flame wars and eventually bans!

So if you wanna keep it clean, don't do such things. Thrust me
Hire payed posters instead on job sites like getafreelancer, etc. and adverstise your board on other forums (with similar topic) with your URL in your signature.

Just my 2cents

Good luck!

Didier

 

picouli ,

Do you have any moderators to help you on your site? One of the thing I did on one of my forum was to pay my moderators to run competition in their section of the forum they manage. Every month we will compete for different prizes on the best section on the forum. We run discussion of the month contest, and award the winning team with special forum icon & t-shirts.

Something for you to think about. Good luck

 

Hi picouli,

$0.10 per post is a good rate and i am sure your forum activity will grow. Anyway, quality is a big problem faced by most of the forum administrators no matter you are using paid posting system or not. A paid post has to be at least 300 chars long is a good idea to control spam. You can install min chars mod for this purpose.

Why not add a referral system to your forum? Please kindly allow me to share my persoanal experience.

Quote from http://hoprofit.com/index.php/topic,1476.30.html

That mean user can get $0.01 per post, $0.02 per topic, $0.10 per referral and $0.01 per referral's post. They can use their earned credits to purchase something from the other members or redeem for cash.

 

Well guys, I think the best idea is to have a revenue sharing forum - just like this one.

And since I (hope to) earn money from ads shown across all my site (not only the forums), I decided that, if a user enters his AdSense Client ID, the ads shown on the topics will be 100% his own.

I think this makes things easier to manage and more interesting (and rewarding) for people posting on the forum.

Don't you think so?

Regards!

 

That might work if your target audience is webmasters and internet professionals. Most people, including most celebrity fans, do not have their own web sites and have no idea what AdSense is. I would also expect that many fans are under 18 years old, and they can't even sign up for AdSense (well, they can, but not legally). Even for people with AdSense accounts this isn't much of a deal until the forum starts getting a lot of traffic and members.

I think you would be better off doing what website4wealth suggested - running contests for the best threads or posts. Everyone likes the opportunity to win something. Maybe buy some forum posts to get things rolling, and give some incentive for people to refer their friends (special avatars? gold stars?).

 

if not everybody has a adsense account, offer something different, but not necessarily money.
You could offer a coupon for amazon.com, or something like that, that will interest your users