Has anyone tried it for advertising, and did it work? I used to rp on usenet, back in the antediluvian pre-web days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but branched off into MU*s and thence to forums. I know it still exists, and there should be rpers there, though.
Usenet is ... hard to explain. It's sort of like Yahoo Groups, but more basic. There are categories called newsgroups, with a newsgroup for just about anything under the sun. People can subscribe to follow whatever newsgroups they want, read, post, and reply to threads in those groups, etc. It seems to me it ought to be possible to advertise games there, but if nobody has tried so far, I guess I'll take a run at it. Goddess knows I'm posting ads everywhere else.
Be sure to report how it goes? I've been trying everything I can think of. I've even taken a look at advertising on virtual pet sites, but one of them had a cost of $100 per 6 hours. Yikes.
Did some digging and found five possible newsgroups. Two for the fandom (Stargate) and three for rpgs in general. Sent my ad (with the formatting codes stripped out, since I don't think it does formatting) to all five. One group is moderated, so that one's in limbo. I'll keep an eye on google analytics and let you know how it goes. Figure it can't hurt. If you want to try it yourself, go to groups.google.com and subscribe to alt.games.rpg, rec.games.frp.announce, and rec.games.frp.misc. You might also do a search on your particular fandom/subject/canons and see what comes up.
