Should You Pay for Posts? Forum Posting Services Reviewed
By: Chris Beasley, Published: 2005-12-23

Lately there has been an increase in people willing to post on your forum for a price. I believe this trend started with post exchanges, and not surprisingly it's a small step to go from bartering an exchange to just paying for posts. I've seen individuals marketing themselves as a poster, I've seen forum owners run contests for the best poster, and I've seen many new companies launch that offer forum posting services.

Now, there are obvious pros and cons to using forum posting services. Let me start off by saying that I'm in favor of them for use with a new site, and I feel this way for one main reason: that the first 1000 posts of a forum are the hardest to get and paying someone for them is a small price to pay in the long run. Opponents of this practice claim that this makes a fake community with no spirit, I disagree with that statement. I think this practice makes no community, fake real or otherwise. The posters will usually only post until their assignment is done, then they're gone. That is not a community, nor is it supposed to be. There is also the worry of hiring poor English speakers and or people who post copyrighted information, but I think those problems aren't very likely (I certainly didn't have them).

The most likely way for someone to join a forum is for them to see a topic that they wish to reply to. You cannot get people to join your forum in this way if you have no topics to reply to. So I see forum posting services simply as ways to create those topics. The goal is not to create a community with paid posters themselves, but rather use paid posters to plant the initial content "seed" and then let it grow naturally, just at a (hopefully) accelerated pace.

You can also pay these services to beef up an existing community, and that is not something I recommend. I've heard of at least one person that did this and had it backfire when the real community members were annoyed by all the new people posting less than useful posts. That makes sense to me as well, communities are like small towns, they don't like outsiders, especially outsiders that trash the place and then leave. That is not to say that paid posters do not provide good quality posts, its just that their posting style might not be the norm for a forum, and also the sudden burst of activity can possibly be seen as intimidating to members used to a more easy going forum.

So, if you've decided to pay for posts you basically have three ways you can go about doing it. You can post on a forum a job offer for forum posters and then you'll need to manage and pay each individual poster, this method is probably the cheapest, or nearly so. You could run a contest where only the top few posters get paid, this method is a little simpler as you do not need to pay many people, but in my opinion this method will also get you the lowest quality of posts. The final method is what I did, that is hire a forum posting service. You pay one person and they handle all the rest.