Since the cash making mood seems to be on the up swing. Wouldn’t a subforum for market talk where people review and ask advice about products be the kind of stuff that advertisers would love?
I know that talk about subforums is always met with great resistance and I understand and like the current system of forums being not for topics but for types of discussion. Still, it does seem to me that product reviews and shopping advice is actually a different type of discussion. It is opinion but with enough of a basis in verifiable facts that you cannot just make stuff up.
I have no idea whether we have enough volume to justify a separate forum but this might be one of those “build it and they will come” deals where having a dedicated venue for it might motivate people to post more on it.
Anyways, I just thought that it would be a space much easier to pimp to ad placement agencies and that would result in more relevant ads with a better clickthrough rate.
And until (if) we have such a thing, what is the right place for product reviews and asking for shopping advice? I always thought that shopping advice would be better suited for IMHO but they seem to pop a lot on GQ and live their lives there. Sometimes they get moved but often are left there and I haven’t been able to figure out the pattern. I have personally made them in both in a basically random manner and they often stay where I started them, wherever that was.
I guess a spontaneous product review would have to be on MPSIMS. Do we have any of those? I do believe that people would make a lot of those if they had a place for them. And more volume means more pages served and more ads shown and maybe clicked.
Just a thought.
I agree that IMHO is an already existing forum for this. At the same time, many of the so called reviews on other sites are shill reviews. Several companies have been caught out posting such reviews to boost their bottom lines. While a shill review is always a possibility here, I don’t think a separate forum devoted to just reviews is appropriate. I see a Pandora’s Box.
This community is small enough that shill reviews should be easy to ferret out: A brand-new account that just happens to post a good review of Foonly Frobnitzim and nothing else can be deleted easily enough. I doubt there will be much in the way of ‘gray area’ here: Spam is spam.
It doesn’t seem relevant; in fact, it almost seems like the exact opposite of what we’re discussing here. It would be an advertising forum, where everything mentioned is only boosted and promoted, as opposed to a forum where bad reviews are allowed.
Sapo, are you talking about a thread in which people post unsolicited comments like “Gee, I sure like Diet Dr Pepper!,” or something more along the lines of a Dope Seal of Approval, maybe a Poll of the Week on a certain product or item?