Fundrasing options / opt in advertising / post and community sponsorship

Codidact Platform Ideas
21

The link and answer you mentioned is why the bounty cannot be assigned by votes, only the op assigns the bounty accepting the answer, this should help to avoid vote wars issue. If the answer fulfills his needs, he can reward it. Bounty history should help to avoid issues like assigned bounty, answered, not accepted even fulfilling needs.

As you have mentioned we cannof fight money laundering, so seems like this shuts out the ideas.

All in all I wouldn’t implement those if there are other better fund rising options.

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22

I’m really nervous about the idea of being involved in user-to-user payments. Lots of pitfalls there…

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23

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imzy

There was one attempt at a community which was kinda centered around a major feature of being able to tip each other as thanks for high quality / useful / fun content, and it didn’t get to graduate out of beta. So there’s one example of a failure on that front.

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24

Or just not OPT-IN.
I think the opt-in model is great. I don’t mind seeing ads. I’d opt in. The folks that run adblocker, I guess, wouldn’t.

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25

I can guarantee that opt-in will generate goodwill for the site. I’ve seen hundreds of posts in various places about how people choose to see ads on a site because they can be toggled on/off, and are default off.

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26

Ads are not necessarily a bad thing if they are relevant and strictly moderated. If they are to be allowed, they must be manually approved, preferably by community moderator consensus. It must be a system designed & maintained by Codidact, integrated in the UI. No automatic crap like Google ads.

And there must be a strict policy for them. For example:

  • The add must be in the form of a static picture. No animated ads, no pop-ups, no automatic re-direction.
  • Adds should not contain scripts. No cookies, tracking, user profiling, spyware, malware.
  • Adds should not be sexist or pornographic.
  • Adds should not be political, religious, spread propaganda or false information.
  • Adds should not contain gambling/lotteries, alcohol, drugs, miracle medicine.
  • And so on.

The best kind of adds are the niche ones that target a specific community. Programming tool ads on the programming community, car adds for the mechanic community and so on. That’s far less noisy than generic ads.

Opt-in/out should be available.

I’m strongly against “sponsored content” however. This is indeed what destroyed Youtube and other social media. People should not post on the site with some hidden agenda to sell products. This worked fine on SO - the companies who wanted to use the site for product support or to draw attention to certain technologies were held to the same standards as every other user.

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27

As a user, it’s not really ads that I dislike, it’s annoying or ads. That’s any ad that blinks, animates, scrolls, or otherwise tries to unduly get my attention other than just being there for me to look at if I feel like it.

I pretty much never click on ads, even the reasonable ones, because I don’t trust where that re-directs me, I don’t want more data gathered about me, and I don’t want to have advertisers who I don’t trust get the desired result.

I would actually be more likely to click on ads if the product seems interesting to me if I know the ad has been vetted by the web site according to the structural rules like what @Lundin posted above. I think his content controls are largely unnecessary, since if the ad is guaranteed to be honest, then the content is what it appears to be, and I can judge that for myself.

With this kind of ad curation, the ads also become more valuable to the advertisers, so the site can charge a higher fee than junk ads would fetch. This seems like a win - win - win, for the advertisers, the site, and the users. I would actually find the right kind of ads useful.

Lots of people will be too lazy to specifically opt in. I would therefore make ads enabled by default, but with a clear opt-out checkbox at account signup and always available in your profile. I would certainly not find that obnoxious, and deliberately leave ads enabled if I knew they were being properly curated.

The message at signup would be something like: While this site is free for you to use, it is not free for us to operate. We offset that expense by selling advertising. All ads on this site are curated according to <link to policy>. We hope that you agree to receiving ads. However, if you do not, we respect your wishes. You will not be shown ads if you click the No Ads button below.

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28

Is it possible to allow only certain adverts with Google Ads or other ad services? If not, I feel we may have a problem with getting advertisers specifically for the site, since we’re starting off small.

29

Early on, I don’t think we’ll need ads – donations should cover us for a while. By the time it looks like ads might be helpful, I hope at least some communities would be large enough to be relevant.

Ads aren’t “free”; either we’re letting junk run on our site (SE’s current problem) or the ads need to be screened and sandboxed (SE’s previous practice), which requires someone to do it. If we can avoid external ads I think we’ll save ourselves some headaches. (I said “external” because the idea of community-driven ads, like designed sites on SE have, is a different concept. It’s also not a revenue stream.)

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30

Most of the example rules I made above were made with SE’s recent ad fiasco in mind. To have something similar as SE’s current system is obviously out of the question. I don’t think it would be that much work to approve ads manually though. Establish some rules, then implement it as a review queue only accessible by moderators. Each diamond mod get the chance to approve or reject the ad, and if there are no objections after n votes, the ad goes live on the site, for a certain time period.

And if users find ads inappropriate despite the above procedure, they can apply over meta etc to have ads revoked.

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31

Note that any time spent by a moderator on reviewing ads is time that cannot be spent on moderation issues (or normal participation on the site, for that matter).

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32

It won’t take a lot of time and I don’t think there will be a lot of such reviews. If there are, the site could always limit the number.

And to put it the other way around: the time spend by the volunteer moderator will generate income for the organization. If you volunteer to moderate for a non-profit organization - which definitely will need money to maintain infrastructure - isn’t this something you’d be glad to see? Everyone might not have the means to donate money themselves - by doing ad reviews you could still help raising money for the site.

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33

Agreed. It doesn’t sound like that much work.

Another idea is to off-load this to the users. Perhaps there could be some ad pre-view area where users rate ads by voting, and provide feedback via comments. Ads don’t go live until they get some minimum support. This area probably needs to be limited to those with sufficient rep or activity so that they know the site well enough. This also gives ordinary users a way to contribute to the organization other than just giving money.

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