How is this forum funded?

You're right about that. It doesn't make money. That's not say we wouldn't like it to! We just want to make sure we don't spoil what we've created. If you've got any ideas let us know though!

could sneakly sell some links, the site has got a good page rank so it would be

you could ask for donations at the top of the site and indicated how much the server cost is. Probably at least some people will donate as i'm sure that you helped them get the job. also you could make some profiles donator status or have a different colour so people know they donated

or you could allow the forum to be viewed if you sign up, then you have more people to spam for donations lol or i guess you could just make the forum umm closed or only opened for 1 day , then you have to pay membership of £2 to help with the server costs

hmm but i just waffled, i'll try and think of some more

i don't know if some companies offer a referal/affiliate fee if you find them a potential employee..if they did then i guess you could have a link to each website with an affiliate link for the relevant company

look at other job site competitors and try and work out how they make money :)

I think a donation request like wikipedia had recently would be a good idea.

Chris and I have been discussing the donation idea for a while.

@Traineewannabee - the idea for different donator user status is a other good one. I guess we could have several colours depending on how much users had donated over their lifetime.

hmm charging users is not a good idea.
- most websites dont charge their users a fee, they generate income in other ways.
- not all industries are built up enough with sticky how to get a job posts either, so a lot of users wont get satisfaction for their money spent. the accounting dudes might, others less so.

@ Newbie - I think it's highly unlikely we'll be charging users for access to WikiJob. The users are WikiJob! And anyway.. employers have a lot more money than students and graduates so long term, if anyone should be paying it should be them!

However, there is a lot of value in WikiJob for users (I think!) and a great deal of resources are used to keep this site going - so if users did want to say thank you with a fair donation it would be very well received!

One idea that I have, and has probably already been considered...

would be to have 'premium pages' which a company would pay for, allowing them to have more control about the information/recruitment process page, I could see maybe them being able to adapt the page's style to match their corporate image etc.

However this would raise concerns with any openness or impartiality, might be perceived as Wikijob favouring and promoting some employers over others.

This is a great thread. Thank you people!

@ Ucayman - It's a good idea and something that has been discussed between the WikiJob founders and actually with companies too. However the conflicts of openess and impartiality do worry us. Also, many other sites host company profiles already.

The ultimate goal would be to develop a means of commercialising the site, without hosting any kind of direct advertising and whilst maintaining our neutrality.

Out of curiosity, we have been thinking about putting up google adwords on a temporary basis to help us cover the costs of running of it (which can be pretty significant). Do you think this would devalue what we are doing or do you think most people wouldn't really be bothered by it?

I'm not sure how much you would get from it, but i think i've seen it on other job sites, beside there's enough good information on the site for people to not get put off by a few ads.

Just try it for a month, watch the bounce rate and other stats and see how much you get!

I agree with that. I think a trial of adwords would be interesting and potentially useful, but I don't think we should put it on the front page or in the forum - just wiki pages.

I also think a trial of the donation facility would be interesting, particularly after the news about Wikipedia's recent donation drive will have brought the concept of donating for useful online services to the front of many user's minds. ..I imagine that when users get their job offers, they will be particularly likely to donate too!

Because Wikijob is primarily a community, and relies on the willingness of people to spend time detailing their experiences and giving advice, is it right to use ads to raise money on the work of others? I would argue that if you could make it clear that it is to support the running of Wikijob, maybe have the text ads in a section titled "Help support Wikijob" (???).

For the first time in months of using the site, I noticed the little services section, I think they could be made a bit more prominent, but that might bring capacity issues. Maybe put some links at the bottom of the organisation pages, much like the interview/covering letter advice pages have.

Chrism: Personally I wouldn't be too bothered by it, but then again that probably means I wouldn't click them either, I normally just 'zone them out'...

Redsuperted: I actually think that there would be no issues with having adwords on the forum pages, I agree that none should be on the front page though. But I think there should be a max of two text ads on the right hand side, keep any impact on users' navigation to a minimum.

I like the donation idea. Maybe Wikijob should encourage those that do get a grad job with help from here to tell everyone, maybe a forum section or a form with the username added to a celebratory page?? You could then send a congratulatory email to those people and hint that now they are going to be earning lots of money they should donate some to Wikijob ;-).

Think that was a bit of a ramble...

Ucayman

do you mean adsense?

adwords is for like advertising your own website, probably something you don't need to do considering you have so much fresh content and high seo rankings

We're trying Adsense. The placement is not entirely perfect yet!

What do you guys think?

Edit: wink @ Traineewannabee!

I think the best way to make money would be to start seminars for graduates on the job market. For those that have received job offers as a direct result of WJ, they would be more than willing to do these things for free. Hire a hall, get those speakers in, charge a small fee (possibly a fiver for a ticket), and you would honestly get loads in.

The seminars could be about anything: "Q & A session with a KPMG trainee" for instance. You could also plug your CV and cover letter services in the session. You could also start up small fairs of your own, hire a hall, sub rent small spaces for companies that are recruiting, and also plug wikijob there.

Once WJ becomes THE website for graduates, you could charge a small fee for premium services, such as, the ability to download booklets such as those from insidecareers, or discounts on books related to careers from suppliers. Even, and this would absolutely rake it in, organise something with the economist to take a cut from people who subscribe to the Economist from this website (the idea could apply to other specialist magazines). Who knows?

I don't think you could make much money from ads by Google, or from this actual forum, but I think ideas such as those could do well. Just my 2 cents, as they say.

HTale.

PS. Not liking the Adsense

yeh that#s good, high risk though well and a lot of effort lol but good.

Yeh the subscription idea is good also

You could also have a job board i guess in one section where people could pay you to list their vacancies

I think a job board would work, but a lot of work is needed to keep it a quality job board. There are a lot of problems with the way job boards are layed out on other websites. I think a totally seperate website for that would work - a sister site even, and move the CV and cover writing services to there. Perhaps it could be called WikiGetAJob.co.uk? haha!

@HTale - what exactly don't you like about the adsense?

What do you think of how they lay out the adsense on this site - http://wikitravel.org/en/Yakutsk

I don't like it really either (no offence haha), I think because it blends in and we'll all click it by mistake. how much % is this going to cover you server costs, do you know on average

But anyway, it's your forum and I doubt it will stop anyone visiting the site or staying on it

Not to sound like a **** but we wouldn't want to hack off our users. If the concensus is that Adsense is ****, we'll take it off.

We have other plans to commercialise.. I don't expect adsense will be here forever, but if it makes us enough money in the short term to keep the site going, it would be useful.

Traineewannabe, if we set out the adwords like it is set out here (see http://wikitravel.org/en/Yakutsk) would you prefer it?

I think the layout you provided in the link is much better. The only problem is that there are some important features to the left and right of the forum text, so I don't know how you'd reconcile the two. I'm sure you will though :-)

Simple... we could just have adsense on the wikis. Not necessaryily on the forum.

Seperate web site idea is quite a good one actually! We need to get some money into WikiJob really- even adsense is unlikely to cover what it costs to run. We took down the adsense stuff we had on yesterday (it was a bit rubbish), and we didn't make much money. I might try and and set it out a bit like Wikitravel and we'll see how that works....

Thoughts? Comments?

I have a new idea - I'd like to put it to the organic focus group we have here :)

It relates to user profiles. We have the potential to open up your profiles, providing wiki space on them for you to write whatever you like - photos, uni details, education details, - literally anything you like. You could make it professional and use it to attract recruiters, or keep it fun. You could keep it open and use it as a wall and let others edit it, or lock it so no one else could.

If we were to open up this facility, but on a charge basis - let's say, £2/month or £19.99/year - would you guys buy it?

To be honest, I personally wouldn't if I were considering what I would get out of that facility.
But I would buy it just as a gesture to help support the site because it has been very useful for me.

I would only do it if I made money out of it somehow lol

hmm, I like this thread though

Would you use a wiki profile once you'd bought it/if it was free... would the concept work for you?

mmm i don't think so to be honest, i still would just use facebook plus there's a lot of free blogs and stuff which people may use all of which are free anyway :s

Very, Very Interesting... I find this conversation very intriguing. I think you guys have a very valuable asset in this site and I would advise that you don't rush into any unnecessary models if you can help it. This site has huge potentials. Keep it simple but necessary. You just need to thrash out some thorny issues that this thread has started to address. Keep up the good work though. This site is the future!

I think, before going for any of these schemes to raise money, you should look at the exact factors that led to the professional services forums on this site becoming so popular, and see if they can be replicated for the other industry sector forums like consultancy and investment banking. If you can fill up those parts as well then you would make so much more money..

Thanks for all your input guys...

Over the past week we've tried adsense (very poor revenue) and donations (two people contributed).

Having tried these methods of revenue, unsuccessfully, we are forced to move towards a conventional job board revenue model... button ads and job board posts....

If you do not want this there is still time to donate! Otherwise WikiJob is heading for conventional commercialisation in the very near future.

WikiJob.

so is it Chris and Redsuperted who started this site? What is your guys' background, out of interest?

I don't see why having a few ads in the right places would undermine the site - but I agree with some other posters that you would need to build it as a brand before you could really do anything in terms of employer referals or seminars and stuff. Top-consultant is a good example to possibly emulate - they hold paid-for seminars...although the TC forum is utterly terrible, just full of bitter old consultants' whining and attacking each other. One of the genuinely great things about this site is that people genuinely want to help each other and the information is generally accurate.

I would try to build the brand though, to get back to the original point - if you had enough users, or if Wikiijob became the site grads went to, then I reckon employers would start to take notice and you could leverage that into advertising revenue and/or premium/sponsored content (like the Vault).

Have you thought about promoting the site to grads at universities in order to push up unique userage - maybe there are ways to do this for free. I have no idea how many people use this site, but seems like it's not one of those things people neccessarily know about, in the same way everyone will have heard of milkround.com or Times Top 100?

To put things into perspective..

The largest UK graduate jobs website is Prospects with 900,000 unique visitors a month.

The second largest graduate jobs website is Milkround - currently at 150,000 unique visitors a month.

WikiJob is currently getting 110,000 unique visitors a month - up from 4,000 12 months ago (so the fastest growing graduate website online right now!)

For us it's not a question of generating users, but a question of commercialising without turning users off the site. We want to be different... and I think we are.... we want to keep things that way but we also need to make a revenue...

Those figures look impressive but I bet you the minute you put a price tag you'll run into problems. I think you need to wait for critical mass before you attempt that and even then a price tag may be risky. Consider the motivation behind users of this site... students, broke, its friendly, peer to peer etc. Those other sites do not have these characteristics. I do appreciate there will be financial pressures but any unnecessary commercial adventures may prove very risky. consider the holy grail of social networking - face-book, even with their popularity they would never be able to justify pay to access if thats what you're considering. Just think about it..

No. We'd never charge the users! We realise you have no money! We are you - and we have no money either, so we understand you!

We want to charge companies to advertise.

We'd never do a Vault and charge for access! Our proposal is advertising for employers....

...discuss......

Prospects, Milkround, efinancialcareers or others charge companies to advertise. I have not seen any ad on this site and that was something i wanted to ask REd and Chris. Forums normally invite employers or the target market players to advertise.

We decided against conventional advertising in case it put users off. However from what everyone's said on here it seems none of you would mind!

What dp you think?

Redsuperted & I both started the site. We're trying to move towards little but effective advertising- if we don't the site is going to run us dry :-(

Pretty frustrating, we're one of the biggest career advice sites in the UK (traffic wise we're in a similar league to milkround and hobsons)!

Perhaps you could make links with the largest graduate recruiters and have a questions and answers board for potential applicants to ask recruiters. The recruiters answer their own questions so there is no confusion about the answers.

I am sure that if one person has a question, it will have been asked before. And by involving the recruiters, they are improving their advertising...so charge them for the pleasure.

I would second that... was thinking about this idea over the weekend actually.

Maybe you set up an 'Official Q&A' section, where a representative from an organisation would answer people's questions. Or just do special live chat/Q&A where a representative will answer questions for a couple of hours, with the transcript published after. Although it is not strictly advertising, I believe it would be good in terms of brand profile, and would personally give me a better opinion of the organisation. Obviously not sure what organisations would pay. Also there really isn't anything to stop them helping people in the forums anyway, for free.

I have quoted this website to companies when asked where I got information on their company and competitors. Some had heard of it, others hadn't.

I also noticed you've expanded the various categories covered, which is a great idea as before you just had finance covered.

I would recommend you contact careers services in Universities to have your website advertised to increase your traffic.

Ezekiel - (and everyone on this thread!) - thanks for your kind words and suggestions.

Ezekiel - thanks especially for mentioning us at interview. That is fantastic and really good exposure for us! ..P.S. please all do that :p

You are right about careers services. The trouble is some are good, some not so good. Whilst great careers offices like the University of Kent, LSE and Leicester (strange mix) will link to us and tell their students to use us - others (I'll mention no names) don't even understand the internet, let alone a wiki website.

The best thing for us is if you guys tell careers offices and employers about us and how good we are.... so... *ahem* ... please do that! :p ..

E. :p

P.S. We're trying variations on Adsense - the revenue hasn't been great. Sorry if it's annoying appearing randomly, we're testing various calibrations... what do you guys think of it?

Just seen this topic.

Considering the amount of help this site gave me in getting my KPMG offer I really should give more back - actually... *goes off to PayPal*

Reg - what did Leicester University give you a shout-out? I asked my course rep to circulate Wikijob to all the Economics students a while back, maybe it was something to do with that?

On another note, I'll be donating on payday at the end of the week

We met Leicester at a conference on Generation Y graduates (meaningless terminology in my opinion!) and they liked us and gave us some links.

Reg - that's absolutely fantastic - honestly, the fact that you went to your department to mention us is phenomenally appreciated. Cheers!

Would you guys like us to put up a list of donors, or twiddle your profiles to have a golden WikiJob star or something similar... or would you prefer to remain anonymous?

A huge thank you to everyone that has donated, edited, added, and used the site. :p

E.

out of interest, wikijob, do you think recruiters actually like you, lol

basically you're telling people the answers for interview questions so they can't catch people out any more so it's harder to differentiate between good candidates that have prepared for everything or ones which have just looked at wikijob and prepared for the exact answers.

and also, if you currently don't make any money from the site, then why do you want more visitors which is costing you money! nah i guess that's besides the point, sorry for waffling

Ed,

I like the idea of a golden star status or something.

Keep us updated on the fundraising, I really hope things work out financially - either way, this site has been a massive success in my opinion.

you could try copying what the career mole site does, saw them on dragons den but they got slated, bascially sometihng to o with employee referal bonuses

They got slated for a reason!

Or maybe not. Perhaps it's worth getting in touch with them. I'll pen them an email and let you know what happens...