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#1 2011-09-28 12:57:09

whocarez
Plugin Author
From: Germany/Ukraine
Registered: 2007-10-08
Posts: 305
Website GitHub Twitter

Switching off advertising for registered/paying users

Hello!

I´m looking for a solution to encourage users to pay a monthly amount for a site. At the moment the site has some advertising (Adsense and some InText links) and I got complains about the disturbing factor of these advertisings. A solution would be to let these users pay a self defined amount of money and after that they get the site without advertising, which means to comment out some parts of the site. Has someone worked out a way to do this?
It would also be interesting to integrate a billing solution like this: http://textpattern.org/plugins/975/plugin-sms-paid-content to automate the password generation and the length of “freedom of advertising” ….

I think, that it would be also interesting for all these blogging sites, which live on advertising, but can´t make a living of it. 50 or 100 users who pay about 10 euros every month are more interesting, than 10,000 pageviews in Adsense.

Has someone an idea? Thanks …
Andreas

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#2 2011-09-28 13:54:56

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,947
Website GitHub

Re: Switching off advertising for registered/paying users

Guess it’ll depend on whether you want to repeat bill them or set up some kind of standing payment. You will need some way to authenticate them to the site though, which is a potential usability hurdle.

One thing you could do is set up a shop using yab_shop. You can differentiate your “products” as:

  • Bronze: 1 month advert free $W
  • Silver: 3 months advert free $X
  • Gold: 6 months advert free $Y
  • Platinum: 12 months advert free $Z

which gives a nice tiered approach and incentives to bulk-buy. Ask for a login name in the Checkout form — you’ll probably need my hacked version of yab_shop for this because I’ve just had to do something similar and haven’t had a chance to validate the mods and hand them back to trenc. Then:

  1. hand off people to PayPal for payment
  2. use smd_ipn (which I can supply you with if you ask) to capture the successful payment details
  3. read the user’s login name
  4. if they don’t already have one, create them an account with a suitably low-level priv (perhaps smd_user_manager could be used to make a new low-level group)
  5. stash the user’s name and subscription expiry date (or start date + duration: your call) to a table / pref
  6. in a Form included on every page, add a couple of lines of PHP to set a txp:variable depending if the date is within the subscription window for the current user
  7. use <txp:if_variable> in your Pages to surround ads

Think that’ll work. Can’t see a simpler way off the top of my head, but someone else might come up with something.


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#3 2011-09-28 16:28:36

whocarez
Plugin Author
From: Germany/Ukraine
Registered: 2007-10-08
Posts: 305
Website GitHub Twitter

Re: Switching off advertising for registered/paying users

It sounds good, so can you provide me the necessary plugins?
Anyway I think it would be also something like a “killer app” for blogs basing on textpattern ….

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