Paying for content

Community
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I’m curious – to do what?

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@HAWK
In my discourse site, the moderators get paid for each post that they create in the site.

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I’m really interested… so you pay moderators to seed discussions? I have questions, if that’s cool.

  • How long have you been doing it and are there any issues?
  • How do you keep the quality high?
  • Do you tell the rest of the community that mods are paid to start discussions?
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Sure, I’m more than happy to answer your questions.

  1. I’ve been doing this since past 4 months. Things are going pretty smooth. Something I didn’t expect to see was “getting traffic from Google without doing any SEO”. My plan was to do some advertising to bring in users. But I never had to do that. The site is ranking for a lot of KWs and that’s bringing in lot of traffic to the site. I was getting “50+ new users” every single day “until I upgraded discourse 3-4 days ago - which broke the discourse-gate plugin that I was using”. And without the discourse-gate plugin, I’m now getting like 10 new users daily.

  2. My site is for students. They ask their study related doubts. And moderators are actually “college students” who joined my site “to assist the high school students with their study doubts”. And since these are “college students”, I got them for really cheap. There is a different pay for “posts” and different pay for “each solution”. (thanks to the solved plugin)

  3. Mods get a custom title in my site “mentors”. And the students in the site have no clue that the mods are getting paid for helping them. So far I haven’t seen anyone asking me or any of the moderators if they are getting paid to post. Also - mods do not start discussions, they just clear the doubts/queries/questions posted by the students. So, conversations are always started by the students. The mods just assist/clear their queries.

NOTE:
This approach may not work for everyone. This is working for me because:

  1. Mods in my site are “college students” - and they are cheap.
  2. Its an aged domain with tons of backlinks. The old site was a “discussion site” too. So, without doing any SEO, it immediately started ranking. (thanks to Discourse too, wouldn’t have been possible without Discourse)
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Ah – got it. So you don’t pay them to seed discussions, you pay them to help the students find solutions. Sounds like it’s working well for you. Thanks for the extra info.

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@nixie How do you plan on monetizing this ?

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I’m planning to monitize using Google Adsense. But I haven’t yet started it. I’ll give it few more months before I display ads.

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Woah, I have to admit, that this idea with learning-oriented community actually inspired me to start my own project! Thanks, @nixie!
Could you please share: what were/are biggest challenges that you’ve met in this type of community?