pay to post sponsored builds?

[Waterlogged]

I can understand the forum-owners, as the banners etc. you find within a worklog are a cheap solution for companies to get advertising into forums.

Usually they would need to pay the forum-owner for banner-placement etc.
By these extremely growing sponsoring-things in worklogs, the companies save money (hardware-parts - to the company - cost muuuuuch less than what you pay for) on "regular ads" and are also closer to the potential buyer AND adblockers have no chance. This makes the regular paying ad-clients feel like stupid. In Germany the two biggest forums already forbid these banners and big namings of sponsors in worklogs, because the "trademark-grab company from Germany" (yuck!) abused it sooooo much. They only allow to name the sponsor in text form at THE END of the first posting.

I fully understand it from the view of the forum owners and also from the perspective of many users who don't want to feel that our hobby is turning in to commercial uglyness where you don't know anymore if "good talking about a company / product" is because it's true, or just because the person needs to say it.

I see it like this:
Forum-owners earn less and less money with the growing "ad-placement" in worklogs. If the forum-owner doesn't earn enough money anymore, he can't run the forum - and you lose a home. This of course only applies to forums where the owner is not Robin Hood. People who take something should sometimes give something back.

Just my three cent and personal view on the topic.

I can't believe I'm doing this but. . .+1 couldn't agree more.

I hate to pick out any one build or person here (and there is nothing personal in this selection, it just happened to be the most convenient one on hand) but, let's take some known examples from XS and put them into a scenario. Let's take phinix_mike's build log for example, He has DFI as a sponsor, that's free ad time for DFI, Gigbyte on the other hand, has paid to have their banner up at the top of the forum. If Gigabyte sees that DFI has done a simple sponsorship deal, they may very well pull their banner (and money) and just go the sponsorship route as well. I may not have a MBA or any other business/economics degrees but if I can do a few sponsorship deals "cheaper" than actually paying for the ad time, it makes perfect sense to me that I should do it.

The way around this however, is to mandate in the forum rules somewhere that if you post up banners of sponsors, they must already be paying for ad time on that site, otherwise. . .they get pulled. This way the site won't lose any revenue and no manufacturer gets free ad time.

I also consider these build log banners a popular tool of shills. Now, I'm not saying all builders that use banners are shills but, a large number of them are.



Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author are not necessarily the views of XS or anyone else but the author himself.