leasing 'sponsored forums'

[infexious]

I have been thinking about the option of leasing 'sponsored forums' to advertisers.

The product would consist of me creating a new forum with its own customized style where all the advertising is completely exclusive to the advertiser.

The advertising client would then be able to appoint users of my forum for me to promote as "moderators" of said sub-forum which would then be totally in control of the advertising client.

The advantage for an advertiser here is that they can use their new sub-forum as a way to promote their product with my existing userbase being driven towards the forum.


Does this break any TOS with vbulletin?

[Steve Machol]

What do you mean by 'leasing'? As per the license agreement:

The Software is licensed only to you. You may not rent, lease, sub-license, sell, assign, pledge, transfer or otherwise dispose of the Software in any form, on a temporary or permanent basis, without the prior written consent of Jelsoft.

[infexious]

Thanks steve, ok just to clarify.

As an example, say the owners of VBulletin for some reason wanted to allow the owners of phpBB to have a sub-forum on vbulletin.com/forum, they could charge them say 200 pounds a month to have a forum on the 'main forum index', that was moderated by representatives from phpbb. They could use it for promotion and marketting etc etc.

To further enhance the offering, vbulletin could design a custom style for phpBB which only showed advertising that they set, kind of like a "sponsored forum" scenario.

phpBB would pay vbulletin an agreed fee each month for a term set by the two organisations. I cant really think of any real working examples although im sure there are one or two somewhere...

[Steve Machol]

Since this is all done on the same vB installation, this would be the same as selling sponsorships to specific forums and there is nothing to prohibit that.