I'm not exactly sure how to implement the user banner concept here. I mean, obviously there are no ads here. But, hmm, a community? dw_market? Where users could opt-in to watch the comm. And members could pay X to have a post appear there to advertise to the other members? (New book, come to my convention, join my community, congratulations to X, come to our meet-up). And there would only be one post per day, and you could choose the specific day you wanted your announcement to run, if that mattered to you? (Season finale of SPN is tonight!)
What an interesting idea! I'd call it dw_classifieds. And I could see the appeal of this, yes, especially if the messages ran on the front page or another prominent place. I think internal announcements are a bit different than advertising.
I have no opinion on options #1 or #2, and honestly I don't need more t-shirts, mugs, etc. I definitely don't like the idea of #3, because that model is indeed tied to charity efforts and it doesn't fit DW.
The only other thing I can think of are new paid option features. I probably wouldn't use v-gifts, although I think they're a popular option and there's no reason not to offer them. (Wouldn't this be a server load issue like icons, though?)
Thinking of v-gifts, I don't know how this would work on a technical level, but I was just thinking about offline fundraising ideas, and one of them was the idea of paying to send a virtual item to people that was temporary, and had to be sent along to someone else in a set amount of time (say 3 days). In the case of DW, a virtual sheep would be an obvious choice and one could pay to "board" him/her with a particular account holder. Tracking where the sheep is, on whose account it has gone to, can be a bit of a game and have its own community as well as perhaps being some kind of alert on the site. The thing is, the person whose account it's on does not have to be the person paying to send it to someone else. People can pay to put it on their own accounts if they want.
I can't see this being a huge single-time fundraiser, but it might be a nice ongoing source of income and many people can participate in it. It can even be a reason for friendly community rivalries.
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What an interesting idea! I'd call it dw_classifieds. And I could see the appeal of this, yes, especially if the messages ran on the front page or another prominent place. I think internal announcements are a bit different than advertising.
I have no opinion on options #1 or #2, and honestly I don't need more t-shirts, mugs, etc. I definitely don't like the idea of #3, because that model is indeed tied to charity efforts and it doesn't fit DW.
The only other thing I can think of are new paid option features. I probably wouldn't use v-gifts, although I think they're a popular option and there's no reason not to offer them. (Wouldn't this be a server load issue like icons, though?)
Thinking of v-gifts, I don't know how this would work on a technical level, but I was just thinking about offline fundraising ideas, and one of them was the idea of paying to send a virtual item to people that was temporary, and had to be sent along to someone else in a set amount of time (say 3 days). In the case of DW, a virtual sheep would be an obvious choice and one could pay to "board" him/her with a particular account holder. Tracking where the sheep is, on whose account it has gone to, can be a bit of a game and have its own community as well as perhaps being some kind of alert on the site. The thing is, the person whose account it's on does not have to be the person paying to send it to someone else. People can pay to put it on their own accounts if they want.
I can't see this being a huge single-time fundraiser, but it might be a nice ongoing source of income and many people can participate in it. It can even be a reason for friendly community rivalries.