Paid-to-post forums

[Cedric]

For those who aren't familiar, Paid-to-post forums are online communities that pay their members to participate in discussions, create new threads, create articles, or otherwise contribute to the community.

On the surface, paid to post forums might seem like a win-win situation. Members get paid for their contributions, and website owners get more activity on their forum. However, there are also potential downsides to this model.

One concern is that paid to post forums may attract low-quality or spammy content. Members may be incentivized to post low-effort or irrelevant comments in order to earn their pay, rather than contributing valuable insights and ideas to the community.

Another concern is that paid to post forums may create a false sense of engagement. Members may be more interested in earning money than in actually participating in meaningful discussions, leading to a lack of genuine interaction and community building.

Finally, there's the question of sustainability. Can a website owner realistically afford to pay their members for an extended period of time? And if the payments were to stop, would the community's engagement and activity also drop off?

So, what are your thoughts on paid to post forums? Have you ever participated in one, either as a member or a website owner? What do you see as the pros and cons of this model? Let's start a discussion and share our perspectives!

 

[Shortie]

I myself at the moment am a member of around 4 paid-to-post forums and active daily on two of which I have received 2 - 3 payouts from both over the few months I have been active on them.

I feel with the right rules in place and ensuring you let the members know what you expect of them to be able to earn anything from their activity, you can prevent pointless and spammy comments from being made and ensure that good quality, informative posts are made towards the forum in which you will receive incentives.

I feel if the forum owner gets enough organic and solid traffic from their marketing and also the content that is posted they may be able to afford to pay the incentives and keep the forum going for its members who wish to contribute but I would never fully rely on a pay-to-post forum for a regular income as you never know when things may change and you lose that income.

 

[Cedric]

I want to add that often these paid-to-post forums are filled with google ads. Which I totally understand since they need some revenue to keep their costs low and effective. But still, the overall browsing is often a not so positive experience, as they want to squeeze the ads in as much as possible. And let's be real, most traffic on paid-to-post forums comes from India which probably is safe to say that 75% of the users use an Ad-blocker.

 

[Cory]

I think I've only tried participating in one of these once and I didn't stick with it for long. If I remember correctly I couldn't really relate to the content being posted very often, which led me to think I would only be posting irrelevant content and I don't think I deserve a payout for that reason. It also generally requires a lot of content to be posted to receive a fair amount of money. Sometimes you would wonder if it's worth your time to be paid so little for content when something like freelancing could probably make you more money, but if you absolutely enjoy posting on the board and can contribute your worth, then that's all the power to you.

Even if I were generating a fair income, I don't think I would ever create one of these boards myself. I would probably be overwhelmed by such a type of board.

They're nice to gain some extra dough, but the points in the OP really do need to be taken into consideration as well.

 

[Heatman]

One concern is that paid to post forums may attract low-quality or spammy content. Members may be incentivized to post low-effort or irrelevant comments in order to earn their pay, rather than contributing valuable insights and ideas to the community.

You can actually fix this issue with setting the word count parameters that's going to earn posters points. If what they post isn't up to the word count required, they won't earn any posting points. They can spam but they won't earn from it. Bizdustry.com did that with their community and it worked very well for them.

 

[an0nym0us]

I have never done it and I don't know if I will do it, but if I did, I would still use the forum to maintain it as well as possible.

 

[Reverie]

I've never done it before, but I find it interesting. I would not be against joining a forum like this - it would also depend on how the community vibes are and such as well.