Threadloom Blog

Curating community content.

Paul Lee

Introducing Primary: Helping forums monetize product discussions

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Note: We are now accepting new forum sign-ups for Primary.  We are currently launching one forum per vertical.  We select forums based on their sign-up order and the quality of their content.  We plan to expand to multiple forums per vertical later this year, and encourage you to sign up even if your vertical has already been claimed.

Over the past five years, our products – Threadloom Search, Newsletter, and List Builder – have helped forums connect millions of visitors with their best content.  If you follow our blog, you know that we’ve been working on making the experience even better for one specific type of content: product discussions.

Today, we’re excited to announce our newest product that helps forums organize and monetize product discussions: Primary.  Primary identifies products forum members are talking about, surfaces them in widgets and SEO-friendly lists, and monetizes them with affiliate links.  During our beta, forums saw affiliate revenue increase by as much as 162% without cannibalizing ad revenue.

Here are a few screenshots, along with answers to some frequently-asked questions:

  • Primary Collection
  • Primary product page

1. How will you use my content exactly?

  • We group products into theme-based, SEO-friendly landing pages.
  • We index only snippets of forum posts (never the full post).
  • We display the full text of original posts, and of specific posts that talk about a product (but still only index snippets).
  • We always link back to your forum so you get traffic and backlinks.
  • Visitors to Primary can ask questions, which we post to your forum.
  • We never sell or share your forum or user data.

2. How are you not going to take away my traffic?

  • We optimize SEO for products and themes, not for individual threads or posts.
  • We target search traffic that currently goes to low-quality product sites.
  • Over half of visitors clicks on Primary go back to forums.

3. How will I earn money I’m not already earning now?

  • We earn money through affiliate links, and share the revenue with you.
  • We offer two tools to help you monetize your forum:
    • Primary Explorer is a widget that shows products relevant to a thread or node.  It lets you earn additional revenue and engage drive-by visitors.  You control what it looks like, where it appears, and who sees it.  For instance, you can choose to show it to only logged-out visitors.
    • Threadloom Newsletter now includes an option to automatically insert products into each issue.
  • Primary Explorer forum widget
  • Inserted products in Threadloom Newsletter

In addition to Primary Explorer and Threadloom Newsletter, we are also launching two new features designed to make it easier for Primary visitors to register with your forum and start product discussions.

  • Primary Login (previewed in this blog post): Primary Login is a simple plug-in that lets anyone register and securely log in to your forum or Primary without a password.  Primary Login includes enterprise-grade security from Auth0, and is free for Primary forums.
  • Ask Primary: When a Primary visitor asks a product-related question, we either send the visitor directly to the relevant post on your forum, or automatically post it for them to the appropriate node.  In our beta, each question from Ask Primary generated an average of seven new forum posts.

We’re grateful to customers who gave us valuable feedback during our beta, including Hardline Crawlers, Long Range Hunting, TalkBass, Tesla Motors Club, WDWMAGIC.  Long Range Hunting saw their take-home Amazon affiliate revenue increase by 162%.  TalkBass realized a 12% click-through rate on products inserted in Newsletter, which resulted in a 9% conversion rate on Amazon.  And sessions referred by Primary back to TalkBass had an average duration of over 5 minutes with more than 4 pages per session and a 33% bounce rate.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use Primary to monetize your product discussions, feel free to drop us a line.  If you’re ready to join Primary, you can now sign up directly using this form.  We are currently launching only one forum per vertical, but we plan to expand to multiple forums per vertical later this year, so encourage you to sign up even if your vertical has already been claimed.

We’re excited to grow Primary in 2021, and look forward to building more great products together.

Product Stories: The second experiment

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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 forum discussions.  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?

To answer these questions, we designed a second experiment with Tesla Motors Club, Tortoise Forum, and WDWMAGIC.  First, we highlighted a specific product, then attached related posts from various forum threads.  Second, we included a brief snippet that linked back to the original forum post.

We also explained to visitors how the affiliate model on the site worked.

As with our first experiment, we generated traffic through Facebook ads, and again targeted non-forum, passive users.  

The overall engagement rate was 23%, softer than our first experiment.  Amongst those sessions, however, there were three interesting results:

  1. The purchase conversion rate improved to 3%, compared to 1% in our first experiment.
  2. Participation was more action-oriented.  In the first experiment, 53% of engaged sessions clicked on a post or product.  In this experiment, that figure was 76%.
  3. About half of these clicks went directly to the original forum post, while the rest went to the retail affiliate link.  The percentage going to the original forum post was much higher than we expected, especially considering that the retail link included a large image above the posts, and a big button below the posts.

The results convinced us that there was a compelling model here, and that Product Stories was worth building out.  But it also gave us insight into something broader.

When we saw that half of the Product Stories clicks went back to the forum, we put those results alongside the retention figures from the first experiment.  We realized that with some elbow grease and luck, we might be able to create a model with a positive click multiplier for forums.  In other words, a single session from Product Stories could, over time, produce more than one click to the forum.

We also noticed something else in the retention data.  We had run a series of early experiments in parallel alongside this Product Stories experiment, testing various presentations of non-product forum stories.  It turned out that users who visited both non-product forum stories and Product Stories were much more likely to return than users who visited just one or the other.

That led us to our second takeaway: By extending the Product Stories model to non-product forum stories, we might be able to further multiply the number of clicks referred to forums.  In other words, it might be possible to finally convert passive drive-by visitors into repeat visitors.

Since wrapping up this second experiment, we’ve run a number of additional experiments to test this hypothesis.  We still have much more work to do, but I’m happy to share that in partnership with our customers, we are getting closer to the goal, and I hope to share more about those results soon.

Product Stories: Exploring new ways to present forum content

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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.

For our first experiment, we partnered with AZBilliards, Home Theater Forum, TalkBass, and Windsor Peak Press.  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 set up a site called Product Stories and generated traffic through Facebook ads.  We targeted non-forum, passive users, similar to what a forum might see from organic search.  Over the course of one week, we sent about 9K sessions to a product story on the site.

About 13% of sessions clicked on a product link, of which, about 1% purchased a product (Fig. 1).  The click-through rate was higher than we had targeted, but the conversion rate was lower. So an ok set of results – not stellar, not terrible.

However, we were much more interested in engagement and retention.  A low purchase conversion rate paired with high engagement and retention rates is more sustainable than the inverse.  Fortunately, the Product Stories engagement numbers were more interesting.  The bounce rate was 69% and average time on page was 4:22, both much higher than we had targeted.

Fig. 1: Percentage of sessions that engaged with the site

Exploring a Product story38%
Expanding a forum post40%
Clicking on a product link13%

Fig. 2: Google Analytics overview

More importantly, retention was significantly higher than average forum retention rates, both in the aggregate and at the individual forum level.

Fig. 3: Google Analytics retention data

The initial Product Stories results were encouraging, but also raised more questions:

  • What would happen if we promoted the products as the focal point (instead of the original post)?
  • In this experiment, we had included the full post text on https://threadloom.shop.  What would happen if we only displayed a snippet, and forwarded “more” clicks to the original forum thread?

In my next post, I’ll talk about our second Product Stories experiment, and what we learned.

Announcing Threadloom List Builder for vBulletin and XenForo

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One year of Threadloom Newsletter

One year ago, we set out to build the easiest and most effective email newsletter service for forums.  The result was our second product, Threadloom Newsletter.  Today, millions of forum members receive weekly newsletters powered by Threadloom (the vast majority of which are sent via AutoPilot, which fully automates content selection, recipient curation, and delivery). We have since received thousands of emails from Newsletter recipients, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.Read more

Threadloom is Privacy Shield-certified

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Over the past several months, we have published several updates about the European Union (EU) General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).  We have implemented a number of measures to further safeguard user privacy and trust, and today, I’m pleased to share another important milestone: Threadloom is now Privacy Shield-certified and on the Privacy Shield List.Read more

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