In Part I of this series I tried to share some of the thoughts I went through as I was planning to start advertising on my biggest board. I was concerned that adding advertising would ruin the “user experience” on the board, and tried to take steps to address that. In this post I want to talk about what I think is required even before you that move. You have to be able to answer these questions:

Do I have something an advertiser is going to be interested in?
What am I trying to sell?
How much is it worth?

It would be nice if advertising budgets were infinite. That would mean that advertisers would not have to be worried about getting a return on their investment. Unfortunately that is not the case. This means that advertisers are not looking for charity cases, they are looking for boards that include focused content, that are active, that present an environment that is appropriate for the audience, and that include effective moderation and spam controls. For this post I will talk about what it means to have focused content, as I think that is probably the most important of these attributes.

What are you selling?
I have read many times on phpbb.com the sob stories about folks that are trying to start a board and failing. One of the biggest reasons is the lack of content. Before you can sell your board to an advertiser you have to be able to sell it to your community. If you can’t sell to your community, then you really won’t have one. How many “general chat” boards are there? How many are successful? Personal web sites seem to be fleeting, whether because they fail to generate an audience or the owner simply loses interest. What is the expected life-span of a new site? 18 months? 12 months? Not even close, according to one article that I found on the Washington Post web site:

It is commonly agreed that the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt was one of the most devastating losses of knowledge in all of civilization. Today, however, the digital information that drives our world and powers our economy is in many ways more susceptible to loss than the papyrus and parchment at Alexandria.

An estimated 44 percent of Web sites that existed in 1998 vanished without a trace within just one year. The average life span of a Web site is only 44 to 75 days.

44. To. 76. days. Days. Obviously it is going to be very difficult to generate any sort of content that is attractive to advertisers in that short amount of time. If you would like to read the full article there is a link at the end of this post. My point here is that in order to sell your board to advertisers, it has to be successful. I don’t think you can be successful with a general chat board. You need a topic.

What’s my line?
Your topic doesn’t have to be appealing to a huge number of users. It just has to be deeply appealing to a very specific set of users, hopefully users with money. The term I have seen used is “sticky” which means that once users visit your site they keep coming back. One of the people I work with owns a pair of clumber spaniels. There are several discussion boards related to that specific breed on the web. I personally don’t see the attraction, but believe me, these dog people are rabid (pun intended). That’s a great market for advertisers because they know exactly what they are getting. It’s an incredibly narrow focus: one specific breed of one specific sort of animal.

A few years back I purchased a Corvette. Ironically that purchase was the reason I got into web boards. I found a site named CorvetteForum.com… in fact I bought my car from a dealer on that site. There’s another target / niche market. General Motors makes about 30,000 Corvettes a year. If ten percent of Corvette owners find this board, that’s 3000 new users a year. Apparently there are a lot more than ten percent that find the board as it’s one of the top 25 boards listed at big-boards.com. They have 163,541 members, 23,070,855 posts, run vBulletin, and just this year sold the entire board to Internet Brands for an undisclosed sum. My point here is that they had another extremely targeted audience.

What about phpbb.com? They certainly have focused content. But to be honest, I think it’s a tough sell for an advertiser. What is (in my opinion) the overwhelming feature that attracts people to phpBB? The price. Who is the audience? I would venture to guess that the average age of a board owner that runs phpBB is under 20. I have absolutely nothing to back that up other than my own intuition. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. When I was 15 I wasn’t doing anything like 15 year-olds can do today. I bet that my budget back then was about the same as most 15 year-olds today, and that presents a challenge to potential advertisers. Because of this, I don’t think phpBB is able to sell their site because of their content and members. I think they are able to sell their site because of their page rank.

Let me finish these examples by talking about something I do have direct experience with, my biggest board known as BOB. This board was built for people that use the software products from a company named Business Objects. The name of the board (Business Objects Board) has been shortened to BOB, as I posted about earlier. Business Objects is now a billion dollar company, and BOB has been able to ride on the wave of their successful growth. This board covers a very specific niche. The software that we talk about is not cheap and therefore it requires a substantial commitment from the companies that purchase it. And that means money. Where there is money, there is opportunity to sell something.

The Payoff
From articles I have read previously, discussion boards are historically paid lower rates for advertising than other types of sites. I tried to google up some links to support this for this post but failed. But if you have a targeted audience there are still ways to justify advertising costs. In some cases it really isn’t that hard.

A brief bit of background on my current sponsorship program for BOB. First, each sponsor gets a dedicated banner for six weeks. The cost is quite reasonable, in my opinion. As a consultant that works with this software package, and one whose skills are in demand, I can get paid a decent daily rate for my services. The companies that would be interested in advertising on BOB are - for the most part - extremely similar to my own, so I am very familiar with their operating model. Here’s my pitch to a potential advertiser:

Me: You get an exclusive banner on BOB for six weeks. During that time your banner will be seen by thousands of visitors, many of them with decision making positions or with budget money. If you get one new client that pays for one week of your services you will have 100% ROI for your advertising.
Sponsor: Sign me up!

Ah, well, if only it were that easy. But the pitch is perfectly valid. Most of our clients generate repeat business. Getting a new client for us is worth tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, in the long run. A six-week sponsorship of BOB is less than a thousand dollars. That’s an easy pitch to make.

Today is August 21, 2007. As of right now I have sponsorships for BOB booked solid out to April of 2008. I don’t have to sell my board anymore; people come to me instead. I like that. I am in the process of transitioning from a dedicated six-week sponsorship to a pay-per-view model that will allow me to run more than one banner at a time. There is a finite number of weeks in a year that I can sell. The number of page impressions on BOB is steadily increasing. You can probably do the math from there.

Summary
So far I’ve posted about how I managed the transition from an ad-free board to one with sponsors. This post was about figuring out what it is that you have to sell. But having focused content isn’t enough. Somebody has to be around to read and react to that content. In order to effectively sell your board you need to go beyond content and understand the behavior of the members and guests that use your board. So in the next post I am going to talk about a very important attribute of your users called RFM.

It’s not what you think.

Related Links

• Saving our Digital Heritage Article from the Washington Post that I quoted above regarding average lifespan of web sites
• Big-Boards.com A semi-official listing of the largest boards on the web
• Sunset Vette A web site dedicated to my car and related stuff. I just recently converted it from static HTML pages into a blog (my fourth). As I mentioned, it was during the purchase of this car that I discovered web boards. That was in 2000. It took me until 2002 to found my first phpBB board of my own. The rest, as they say, is history.