Alternative Monetization - Coupon Engine Integration

[Edgemyster]

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!