Banner Advertisers in News Networks
Foundation style sponsorships are key to community news networks:
- Shared commitment
- Allows benevolent giving by those who will gain or want to give back
- New community members come with an interest, looking for a place to freely share
- Eventually, new members may find they have much to contribute back
- Banners are a simple way to acknowledge those who provide financial support to power the infrastructure for the community.
Banners
Why does eZ get the banners on this site?
Ez.no, provides the open source framework, eZ Publish, which powers this site. Recognizing the importance of community style open source collaboration to continuously push the envelope, eZ provides an out of the box implementation that is completely open source, and completely free to use. It is the same basic framework that, with customizations, powers some of the top media sites in the world.
Without this open source framework, building this site could consume thousands of man hours. Then would require at least a few years testing, to get bug free enough for general cross-platform use on multiple hosting environments. The banners on this site are a way to recognize the contribution of eZ. It also is a demo of how to integrate banners for top level sponsors of news network sites.
Building A News Network - Sponsors
Sponsors are the key to getting started. Ideally, they should have:
- An interest in the success of the news network
- An understanding that grass-roots participation is the true power of the network,
- A belief in the long-term benefits of building participation and support in a community setting.
A group of top level sponsors committed to foundation style sponsorship, is the ideal. Single sponsorships run the risk of appearing to be just pure promotion for the sole sponsor. Grass roots contributors, who freely share, must know that their contributions are part of building a greater "whole", that advances the purpose of the community.