Alternative Monetization - Coupon Engine Integration
 

We are looking for possible interest and feedback from the community with regards to an alternative means of driving revenue to the owner of a forum while providing their members with a value-added service. If there is enough interest, we would build a module for vBulletin.

The concept is simple: offer coupons and deals to your members for a share of the revenue that is generated (CPA). There would be no costs to the forum owner.

All deals would be piped into your forum and fully searchable and customizable. For example, if your web site caters to home improvement, you can optionally customize the deal engine to include only merchants and deals related to that particular topic. Statistics and revenue would be tracked through the forum owner's account with our company.

The deal engine would be integrated in such a way that members could rate and comment on available deals using the functionality of the forum. One proposal might be that once the forum owner enables the deal feed in the vbulletin software, the system enables a deal forum within the list of forum categories. The webmaster can now offer a fully functioning deal forum. Alternatively, deals might be presented in a separate tab outside of the forum that presents deals through a community driven deal engine.

For larger communities, they could potentially negotiate exclusive deals from merchants and drive more value to their members.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Even if this is not interesting to you I'd like to know why so that we can better understand how we might present alternative forms of monetization for forum owners and plan accordingly.

Thank you!

I realize this is an old post, but I'd be interested in something like this. I'd want to be able to hand-pick the stores, and I wouldn't want "special offers" that are really just advertising like "buy this product and save"... only coupon codes. Willing to use a service that takes part of the revenue if I don't have to search for and post them myself.

I'm surprised there isn't more interest in this. Having run a forum myself for several years, there are usually only a limited number of ways available to a webmaster to generate revenue, usually including membership fees, advertising and Google adSense. And not all are very effective or even equate to that much money unless you drive a lot of traffic.

With the economy the way it is right now, EVERYONE is looking to save money. We have seen a tremendous amount of growth in this space in the last year.

Loyal members will no doubt first consider shopping through their favorite forum since they have an understanding that a lot of forum owners finance their site out of their own pockets.

Imagine if you had a large enough or extremely targeted community where you could request an exclusive coupon from any one of the hundreds of national merchants we do business with (incl. The Gap, HP, Dell, Old Navy, AT&T, Apple, etc.).

vBMA offers this :D

Would you mind sending me a link to a site where I can see this functionaity implemented and in use? Thanks!

I don't see how having a "members area" has anything to do with coupon codes. If anything we'd want the links to the online stores available to the public.

Agreed, I didn't see the connection either.

We have added a coupon system to vBMA for the purchase pages, where you can specify values in the ACP per coupon and how many times it can be used / which users can use it.

I think we're talking about two different things here.

What I'm interested in creating is an interface within a forum to navigate and search for coupons/coupon codes, much like a coupon site, where your loyal forum readers can turn to when shopping at national online merchants (Macy's, Dell, HP, Amazon, etc.).

Our business would provide the coupons into the coupon engine and pay forum owners on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis. In other words, everytime someone buys something by using a coupon in your forum, you make a % of the sale.

You make money, you fund your forum (potentially to the point of profit), and your readers feel good for having found a way to support the site.

This is an alternative to banner advertising, Google adSense and any other method used for monetizing a forum's membership and general traffic.

Yeah, I see what you are saying.
That's a really cool idea to do something like that.

I was merely saying that with vBMA, the new feature will allow users to get revenue back

Quote from vBMA:

Yeah, thanks for sharing. However, it's not really relevant to the focus of what I was discussing in this thread.

Neat idea, I suppose you could do this a simple way, by posting deal threads, include the coupon and so on. http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/...gi?id=seovbaff

I would use this if it were developed.

Certainly - and many forums have included coupons in that manner before, so this would be taking it a step beyond that.

This particular integration would impact efficiency and remove the work required (of admins, staff & users) for finding, adjusting for tracking and posting coupons. Work restrictions ultimately effect the total revenue a forum might generate. And since administrators and staff generally have plenty of other work to do already, we would syndicate our entire coupon database within your forum.

That means from Day 1, you would have 3000+ coupons that are QA'd to work on a continual basis. Plug it in, turn it on, you're ready to go. No more work for you -- and the check is in the mail.

Integration options into the forum are endless and limited only by our collective creativity, with the minimal implementation being a searchable directory of stores. It would be great to bridge the gap between directories and actual discussions and inject coupons into relevant conversations.

Anyway, any additional feedback is greatly appreciated. If there is a serious level of interest, we will create this for the community ourselves.

Hi Edgemyster,

I just signed up for coupons.com to offer coupons on my website via their portal.
Are you familiar with their system? which coupon company do you work for?

My forum is all about saving money.
Let me know if you need a guinea pig.
I'm evaluating coupons.com system for the next month.

I'm interested in the ability to search the deals also which you mentionned.

my forum: http://www.frugalvillage.com/forums
Feel free to PM me if you have further details.

I'm familiar with their site. Their coupons (grocery) in addition to ours (national stores) would be a great 1-2 punch for your visitors. Do they do a revenue share of some sort?