Let's talk about Monetizing your Community & DawgNation

I think it's no secret that online media is down across the board. Page views are down on virtually all the media sites and it's become an increasingly competitive landscape due to other sites such as Reddit. We know media companies are not a target we necessarily seek out in our Marketing channels anymore for this very reason. That said, we have a considerable amount of MRR wrapped up in Media companies who for the most part have forums to drive some form of direct profit, otherwise what's really the point.

It's also no secret that advertisers do not particularly like forums. Unlike a traditional media site such as DawgNation, advertisers do not necessarily want to be associated with potentially unsavoury content posted by forum members. I've heard this from several clients who had to churn and could no longer pay their bills for the forum (Allhiphop, Shoryuken) as well as Dawgnation today. Even though the same demographics consume the ads on both the main news site and the forum, the former is specifically curated content that the advertisers can trust to be associated with.

One strategy that Cox Media Group (CMG) has found effective on their DN site was to have particular sponsors be the featured sponsor for a particular section of their offering rather than just use Google Ad-Sense. This works out well for them because the brands they can target for advertisement can be Atlanta/Georgia focused since the vast majority of their readership will come from that region given the content they produce. That said, that model could work for anyone really if you had a busy enough forum and wanted to work out a sponsorship with a larger more national brand. We actually do talk about this as a strategy in the booklet that I assume @Adrian wrote about monetizing your community.

Ex:

Tower's take brought you by Marco's Pizza.

I am trying to strategize on how I could bring a similar model to their forum with their resident subject matter experts who are essentially the staff writers of their main site that post in the forum. These individuals get the most views of their content and the fact that they represent DawgNation/CMG would probably placate the reservations held by advertisers towards using forums.

My idea is to give these staff writers a special role and probably will use the role tracker to further highlight their content. What I need to figure out is what might be the best way to highlight an advertisement when they post. I am looking for ideas here:

• Would it be something through theming whereby the header of their post is made to be appear larger and contains a specific advertisement that can be swapped out?
• Is it a question of adding the advertisement to their signatures?
• The 'best' solution in my mind, and I don't know if this would require a custom solution, would be to display ads between comments via pockets but the ads that appear be specifically conditional to a certain role i.e this staff writer role. Sounds unlikely but maybe it's a question of the javascript used in the ad pocket.
• They could start their post with some kind of placeholder text that links to what they're advertising.

I am focusing on DawgNation now because they are a VIP that will unlikely remain a VIP with the current conditions due to their massive restructuring at CMG. If I can find ways to help them get money out of the forum then they will remain. I am also discussing the notion of tier'd memberships.

The reason I am bringing this up is to find viable strategies for media companies to gain more revenue from their forums that do not involve us really altering our product. We do not want to spend our scarce dev time as it is catering to this demographic so perhaps there strategies from the 'community' side of things or already existent within our product that will help save these accounts from potentially churning in the future.