- AFN -

Paying per post results in some worthless threads and posts. Can't argue with this. However, it also produces the upside of more page views than without pay per post sigs. The counterargument to this is that while that is true, the quality of the posts take away from the general purpose of this board--to discuss industry news and trends and faclitate business to business activity.

Some suggestions:

PPP sponsors should employ both qualitative and quantitative appraisals of how their sig campaign is doing.

Quantitative--put ref tags in the sigs and count how many actual webmasters sign up. Of those, how many actually produce.

Qualitative--sponsor should log in once in a while and run a search on their sig promoter's threads and find 5 random posts. This should give a composite of the quality of the promoter's threads. This also gives an idea on the general image (good or bad) that the sig promoter gives to the company.

Using these two criteria, sponsors can then make informed decisions on whether a sig campaign is effective, mediocre, or even harmful.

Another approach would be to limit posts to certain topics and sig promoters CANNOT start threads. This is probably the best
approach--discussions are limited to topics that the sponsor actually CARES about (ie., which program covers a certain niche? which programs have sponsor hosted galleries, etc etc)
Since these discussions are FEWER and MORE NARROWLY FOCUSED...they provide more information to readers and greater value for sponsors.

The suggested tracking method for this would be to have the poster email a collection of thread URLs to the sponsor and the sponsor then pays ... per thread. Extremely business specific and all but KILLS unnecessary posts.

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cat cash* | tr -d '\r' | tr -s '/n' > money