This idea has been brought up before, but I'd like to make a sort of official thread and with the hope of the community to back me up on this. There are a lot of great premium third party mod and theme developers out there. Yet there is not one place for everyone who has vBulletin, to discover them. Your competitors such as xenforo and ipb both have large premium marketplaces, hosted on their sites for easier user discovery, and vBulletin is the leading forum software.
The free sections are great, but why not make it more advanced, one click to purchase..
Please offer a marketplace for developers to display and sell their mods. I think this is an immediate concern as this will bolster your 3rd party developer earnings and the number of 3rd party developers that are attracted. If you know from history, Apple has grown their strength not just from their software, but more importantly by the developers who build off it.
Anyone else think this is a good idea, please post below.
David Ahmad
Founder of vBSocial.com
The paid XF and IPB markets are actually significantly smaller than the vB market. This is partially BECAUSE of their marketplaces - it encourages developers to neglect the free market and instead release all mods as low $5-$10 alternatives.
In turn this stifles innovation because
1) Users don't want to pay to test something they might not want, and so install less mods.
2) Developers charging prices that allow them to develop full time get crowded out by low quality, cheaper alternatives, leading to a dearth of high-quality professional work.
I think if this was implemented it should come with some requirements on the coders - e.g a supported Free version of each mod with a minimum of x% of the features of the pro version, to protect and continue to grow the free mod market on vBulletin.
06-14-2013, 08:39 PM
Threaded Mode