I discussed this on another site and wondered what people on here thought of it as a concept. (that means an idea and no actually model built).

Here is the story:

Webmaster A is looking to advertise his forum on other forums wants to have his banner flashing on other forums. He doesnt want to do recipricols or banner exchanges because he already has commitments to that or wants to remain bannerless. He just wants his banner to flash as much as possible on X Forum.

At the same time:

X Forum admin is wanting to push his website and feels that to do this he needs a lot more activity on his forum. He has considered
post exchanges but feels the hassle of registering and joining someones forum and posting on it a worthwhile post just to get a post back that could possibly be a load of crap, isnt worth his time, especially as he could just as easily post on his own forum instead.

So here is the concept. A forum software that works in conjunction with a banner software whereby Webmaster A can register to X Forum, upload his banner to the rotation and then every post he makes earns him Z amount of banner impressions for his banner.
The more he posts, the more impressions he earns and the more his advert gets blasted to the members of X forum.

The pros of this are:

X forum admin gets several new members who in turn are posting like crazy some quality posts (random checks would be applicable to make sure they fit the required post minimum, a la...10 word minimum posts) in an attempt to get more banner impressions. This in turn leads to greater activity attracting greater numbers of members and providing fresh content for old members. Get 5 Webmasters registering for this banner program and each one posts 10 posts a day to gain advantage of the impressions and your looking at a minimum 50 posts a day on your forum! Especially if you offer large rewards such as 500 impressions per post. (5000 impressions a day for just 10 posts per day is a great offer for most Webmasters).

Webmaster Y is getting to advertise with a banner advert offering impressions in exchange for no fee other than the currency of posts. He doesnt worry about banner swaps/ratios or paypal donations to get the impressions, he merely has to just post on the forum as an active member to keep topping up his impressions account. He can literally advertise as much or as little as he likes depending on how active he is at posting.

Alternatives to this scheme are:

1 Post = 1 guarenteed click through..... (Webmaster A is guarenteed traffic by being offered unlimited impressions until such time his click throughs in his account are used up, so if you want 100 visitors to your website, make 100 posts and sit and wait!)

Impressions for Topics..... Rather than offer Impressions for the number of posts, why not offer them just for topics started. This will build up the number of topics and give regular members topics to reply to.

Impressions based on Rank/Post Count..... Members that have less than 100 posts receive a ratio of 100 impressions: 1 Post, For every 100 posts they make on the site they receive a greater impressionsosts ratio. Eventually getting to someone that has made 1000 posts receives a 10000:1 impression to post ratio. (it means the more they post, the less they need to post encouraging Webmasters to post more and more to gain bigger rewards).


These are just a few ideas I have on this concept. A concept that after some degree of browsing I have found doesnt exist anywhere and considering there are literally MILLIONS of forums out there on the WWW and out of them MILLIONS, 99.9% of them are desperate for activity and posts and members, it is suprising that this gap in the market hasnt been considered before.

The tools are technically in place. For example Joomla has a Banner programme that allows uploading of banners into a rotation system that allows random displaying of banners, and allows Clicks and Impressions to be added (once used up it unpublishes the banner from the rotation list until it is "topped up" again).
We also have MODS for PHPBB and SMF and VBulletin that allow various Post Count rewards for example, Phpbb2 had a Cash Mod which allowed Posts to rewarded as virtual currency, and then an Arcade Mod that allowed the spending of this cash currency to play games.

So the concepts of using Posts to pay for things is there. It is just taking a technical genius to come up with the coding to stitch them together and give every forum webmaster on the internet the opportunity to sell advertising space in exchange for the currency of Posts/Topics, and give every small website owner the opportunity to mass advertise across the internet for free and only a small amount of time posting on various forums required.

So what do you think on the concept? And dare I say it.... anyone feel confident to tackle that one for the good of all Webmasterkind (no??? ok didnt expect it )

I certainly dont have the skills or the capital to invest in it but thought I would mention it here as one of them free Brainstorming ideas in case there are any Coders or Modders out there that are desperate for some new project ideas or challenges and think they might want to give it a shot for themselves. If you do then best of luck with it and keep me informed how it goes as I for one would love to offer a scheme to webmasters whereby advertising space can be bought with the currency of Posts.

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I think that this is a very good concept. I think one of the huge problem with advertising is the expense. A lot of forum owners can't afford to pay for the advertising they so desperately need. However this would mean that they don't have to worry about the cost.

At the same time though it could cause problems for the forum owner as they might get too obsessed with posting on the forum and therefore not give their own board the care and attention that it requires. This has both pros and cons, I think that this could only really work if the administrator had a lot of time to spend on their forum.

True... but on the same token this website runs a Post Exchange which itself requires an Admin to spend a great deal of time posting on other websites in return for some posts. The difference is that instead of receiving crappy spam posts back on your site in return, of which you have no way of controlling the quality, you are receiving banner advertising instead.

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