Bad idea?

Donald Trump says always go with your gut, good or bad.

You have answered your own question IMO. If it feels right go for it.

Ask yourself "what have I got to loose?"

If things do go tits up what do you loose?

If things go right how much can you potentially gain?

To me it looks like you can gain, free time, money and a friendship.

Good luck

No problem mate hope it works out for you.

Just have to go with the gut but think about the pros and cons

good luck!

Vivo,

I think your idea is good. Giving up control isn't usually a smart idea. If it's your business, you need to make sure it runs the way you invision.

There are plug-ins for vbulletin that allow you to share ad revenue with moderators. Or you could just manually calculate a percentage of the revenue at the end of the month. How you do that is up to you.

What you're proposing has been done before. If that's the way you want to do it, it's ok to do

Another thing that I've learned through experience is NEVER kill the incentive for someone to produce results. If you give someone a deal where they don't have to produce results, they generally won't.

Consider offering a bonus (or several levels of bonuses) for this moderator to grow the number of threads & comments on the forum. Think about quality guidelines so the forum is good enough for people to participate in.

I've started several forums and had the people really engaged. This person should be able to do that. After he gets it going you should probably add a few of the most involved members as moderators. With a lot of heavy activity early on, you can have a self-sustaining forum in 30-60 days.

Consider offering the guy a certain cut of the profits (20% to start), but then offer him 30% if he meets certain goals. Vbulletin has statitistics on the back end not just of overall threads, but of overall participation. You could look at metrics and use average comments per user as one of your metrics.

If you do that, here's how to figure out when to offer 30% instead of 20%. 30% is 50% more than 20% (20 * 1.5 = 30). So the guy running the forum should have to increase the overall forum performance by at least 50%. But usually that's to generous. You should split the difference. He should need to increase performance by 100% for a 50% raise.

So if the average comments per user this month is 7, he should need to double it (100% improvement) to move from 20 to 30%. If the comments go back down to 7, he goes back down to 20%.

If at the end of the month comments are at 14, then you offer to increase to 40% if he doubles from 14 to 28. You could set another level of 50% profits when the average comments per user is 56.

It's entirely possible to do this, but it will take a moderator that can engage the audience + help them with their problems. He should be able to inspire people to create new threads, help each other out, and create a real community.

If he does this, he is creating a forum where it will make him decent money off the ads, and will also do the same for you.

If you don't structure it this way, what will make him try as hard?

It's basic business Reward for Performance!

I can control what he would control. I am not handing over my bread and butter. I am merly allowing him to be moderator, not admin. The only way he could do anything is to hack,but not much you can do. I am using phpbb, and you can designate roles. He also has done some web design successfully, dones forums, as well as resell on ebay. I really like the bootstrapping mentality. He also said he never thought he could find a traditional 9-5 gig. Idk. I am waiting to hear from him. Thanks for the advice.

Thats what I was thinking about. He can create his own opportunities on the forum (by allowing him to create his own subforums, which by default he will promote, since he will earn 100% of the ad revenue from that forum.) This way, he will create value, as well as be creative. Not only will he boost traffic, he will acrually create more ideas for the forum, which he can profit from directly, while still beong an employee. Thanks!