Exploring new ways present forum content

[threadloom]

We get questions from time to time, how does Threadloom make a profit, or what else are you guys working on...this answer that.

Beyond our Search and Newsletter products, we are continually exploring how to better connect non-forum users with our customers’ communities. Over the past year, we’ve partnered with several customers to test new ways of presenting forum content to increase engagement while also generating revenue.

Since nearly every forum includes discussions about products, we decided to see if we could make these stories more relevant to people outside of these communities.

We partnered up with two popular XenForo sites Home Theater Forum and TalkBass along with a few other communities running vB. Using a set of recent threads, we extracted canonical products, linked them to retailers, and grouped posts around each product. This was a one-time effort (in other words, we didn’t update products or posts at all during the experiment).

We created Product Stories

You can read the first blog post we started on it here.

tl|dr: We created a product called Product Stories that created longer engagement, and user retention along with some users purchasing the products they were researching.

 

[Max Fridman]

Interesting concept, you will release an addon eventually that does this or a service?

 

[threadloom]

Interesting concept, you will release an addon eventually that does this or a service?

In short, yes. We are still working on that solution, and hope I can be more in-depth for you real soon. There are a few other technical issues that we've yet to discuss, and see overcoming those as the next step.

 

[Max Fridman]

In short, yes. We are still working on that solution, and hope I can be more in-depth for you real soon. There are a few other technical issues that we've yet to discuss, and see overcoming those as the next step.

Im waiting for other blog posts is really interesting

 

[threadloom]

Im waiting for other blog posts is really interesting

We released the next blog post fully on TAZ

Product Stories: The second experiment

In last week’s blog post, I shared about an experiment that we ran last year with AZBilliards, Home Theater Forum, TalkBass, and Windsor Peak Press. To recap, we created a new site called Product Stories with a product-focused presentation of...

www.theadminzone.com

The initial results were promising, but were left with two questions:

• What if we made the products the focal point, instead of the original post?
• What if instead of including full post text, we only displayed a post snippet and forwarded clicks to the original forum thread?