Visitor articles -- possibly for pay? | Site feedback and suggestions | Consumer forum

Based on the amount of useful stuff that people have been writing in the forums, I feel that some of this content could be turned into articles.

I've been thinking about the idea of letting people 1) write their own articles outside of the forum (for a more permanent knowledge base); and 2) letting them place their own Google ads on those articles.

Item #2 is of course to provide some sort of incentive for people to write articles. Although the goal of this site has never been (and never will be) to make profit (and admittedly the ads you see on the sidebar make only a few dollars a month to go towards hosting), I would still like to reward people for contributing good quality material. Since I have no money to pay writers and would gain nothing from this setup (only the writers' ads would appear on their articles), this would work well.

Concerns include:

• quality control over the articles (I would approve everything)
• making sure that writers sign an agreement saying that they will not repeatedly click (or get their friends & family to click) on their own ads -- as this violates the Google terms of service and my own principles
• making sure that writers sign an agreement not to plagiarize material that someone else has written

In the end, each article might only make a few dollars for the writer. And because Google makes you earn at least $100 before cashing out, before writers get any money, they would either have to write many other articles or have an existing site where they make some more on their Google AdSense account. But still. It might be worthwhile.

Thoughts? Anybody interested in testing out this model?