Functionality for Members to promote their Threads.

[addamroy]

I'm surprised after how long vBulletin has been around, there there's still no functionality to let users promote/advertise their content, either via modifications or built-in.

This is kind of disappointing because in almost all forums out there, revenue can be earned by allowing members to promote their content for profit.

Think about it...

Pay to stick a thread for xx days

Pay to bump a thread to the top of a forum

Pay to advertise a thread in the forum sidebar

Pay to advertise at all...

I'd really love to see some modifications created, free or paid, that will allow us vb forum owners to earn revenue by offering advertising options for our members.

In all reality, vbulletin has NEVER had the functionality to allow our users to advertise, only functionality for us to advertise ourselves.

I think if vbulletin and/or a couple programmers really looked at this, making it possible to let forum members pay to advertise or promote the content they create on our forums, we would all as webmasters be making more money, and as would our members.

The only mod I've ever seen that comes close was a pay per bump add-on but that was only for the 3.x series, but the only payment option there was always Paypal. vbulletin has API capabilities built in for multiple processors, like 2 checkout.

It would be great to have some kind of user-engaged method of advertising that would somehow work seamlessly with the paid subscriptions (payments) system vbulletin already has.

Maybe vbulletin could add some hooks into the vbulletin code for things like, sale initiated, checkout in progress, sale complete, sale failed, sale refunded, sale renewed, etc etc.

I just figured I'd try and spark up a discussion about it and see what we can come up with as a group for a solution to this.