An Interesting Idea To Monetize Community Websites

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Community websites are an interesting breed. They can be monetized pretty easily, but in ways that aren’t really conducive to continued growth. If you overdo the ads, you risk alienating the core members who visit the website every day. If you don’t monetize, you risk not paying the bills. For this reason, many forums will decide on charging for memberships. This is a valid idea, but not an easy sell, either.

Another route I thought of was to make your users partners in the operation. You can transfer the website into a new corporation, and sell shares to your members. Let’s say you have a website making $25,000 per year in revenue. With new capital, you know you can advertise, and gain more members. This will make you more revenue. You decided the capitalization of your new website company is $100,000. You sell 50 shares at $1,000 each to your website members.

People could afford this. If you have a big enough membership count, this goal would be easily achievable. The thought would be that people who actually owned the website would want to make it succeed. No more trolling or spamming! You’d have a community of like-minded members who wanted success for the website, because the owned a part.

If things don’t work out, you can sell your $50,000 share of the website back to the users on day one. That would be an immediate double for you, and you could go on your way.

Definitely an idea worth considering.

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