Adsense for Communities

[tmelange]

Title
Adsense for Communities

Short, concise description of the idea
Adsense should be enabled for paid communities.

Full description of the idea
Adsense should be enabled for paid communities. I can't imagine why it wouldn't be.
An ordered list of benefits

• Same as for a paid personal account.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Same as for a

Comments

[charliemc]

Yes, of course.

+1

[toucanpie]

How does it work with multiple maintainers?

And then there's this issue of how, unlike your own journal, where you are creating the content that people are drawn to, a community is made up of multiple people contributing their own content. For one person to get all the revenue made from that combined content - well, tricky business, I think.

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if it would be possible to set things up so any ad revenue from a community could be directly reinvested into the community's paid account. That wouldn't be particularly controversial, though it could get sticky if the community out-earned the replacement cost for the paid account.

[toucanpie]

Ooh, yes, I like that idea. It would be nice if you could then send the extra money charity-wards, but I could see that a) some people might view that as an odd incentive and b) you'd probably be limited to whichever charities LJ were working with at the time. Hmm.

[mlady_rebecca]

I like the charity idea, especially if LJ maintains a basic list of well supported charities.

[dawna]

I would think that heirarchy in a community would need to be established first before they could implement this. As many communities have more than one maintainer, which maintainer would be the beneficiary of the AdSense account? All maintainers of a community are considered equal in status by LiveJournal regardless of who created it, or who does the most work. Some new maintainer could theoretically come in, set up AdSense for the community right under the "creating" maintainers nose and reap the benefits of the program and the other maintainer would have no recourse but to punt that maintainer. But then what happens when that maintainer does punt the other? Does the now non-maintainer still get paid for the impressions on the community? Would the AdSense account be removed or transferred to another maintainer at this point?

Its all too much of a clusterfuck really. I dont see how this could work unless they move to a maintainership heirarchy.

[matgb]

I agree with this, but also think that a maintainer hierarchy would be a good idea anyway.

The idea that someone can creat a comm, run it for years, need help for a bit for personal reasons then find themselves ousted as volunteer helper gets annoyed is something that bothers me.

Another reason I'd like to see this; LJ was created before 'blogging' took off, and now many of the most succesful blogs are multi-author, but make serious money through ads.

If LJ is to continue to grow in usership, and adverts are going to be on the site (a decision I regret but is unchangeable now), then a way for group blogs to run succesfully on here with revenue going to authors would be a good thing.

As it is, I suspect LJ is so far behind the curve on this pickup is impossible, but it'd be nice to have the option.

[dawna]

I am 100% with you on maintainership heirarchy being a good idea. I've been wanting that for a long, long time.

[tmelange]

I really don't see the problem with this. Although content in a community is contributed by many people -- as is the case for any forum, board, or group operated by any site--the person or company who sets up and maintains the forum receives the ad revenue. In the case of LJ, there is one community owner for every comm. That is the person who set up the comm and has the comm attached to his/her account, and is responsible for that comm if it were ever to stray outside of TOS. The comm might have assigned moderators but they are not the owner of the comm

[dawna]

I can assure you that there is no owner of a community. All maintainers are equally responsible for the content of the community. It doesn't matter whether you created the community, whether its your email on the community, whether you are brand new to maintainership or do the most work. A newly promoted maintainer can oust a creator of that community and there is nothing that maintainer can do. LiveJournal will not give it back to the person who maintained it because of the policy that all maintainers are equal in status.

[toucanpie]

I agree with your point that on other sites or forums the money ends up in the pocket of the person who sets up/maintains them. But on LJ there's not really such a thing as necessary costs for your community (ie. hosting). Sure the maintainer might be shelling out $$ for the paid account status, perhaps also for a domain/server/whatever to go alongside the comm, but they might not be and they sure as hell don't have to. The paid account could be paid for by other members of the comm, they could have inherited the comm with paid account time on it; they may have no costs to recoup at all

[tmelange]

When you post a comment to someone's personal journal, your comments are monetized, both by livejournal, and by anyone who has adsense enabled on their own behalf. The distinction you are making between posts made to a comm, and comments posted to someone's journal is illusory. Right now, I have adsense enabled on my journal, and if you were to comment on any post, you would be adding to my page impressions, and if you were to follow a story announcement from a comm to my journal, where the story actually lives, your presence reading my journal would be monetized. The only thing you're preventing by making this an issue where comms are concerned is the owner of the comm (who usually does a heck of a lot of work) benefiting from the ads on the space he/she maintains. And it isn't even that much of a real issue because *someone* is already making money off of the ads, and you have no control over that money at all

[lig]

no need of paid account without this feature