I agree. That has been a core policy / goal of http://WheresTheRemote.com/ (although the site has not really gotten off the ground yet). As a professional I don't want to waste my time reading and replying to ads that aren't worth my while, that don't offer appropriate compensation for example, so I want to know what the advertiser is willing to pay. One of the principles of WheresTheRemote.com has been to require advertisers to provide a rate or range and pay a fee based on the highest advertised rate, to encourage accuracy. In my experience, requiring advertisers to include rate information is not a common feature of job sites.

I don't know how much Turk costs or how well it works, so I don't know if it would be a wise expenditure if you're not making any money. Again, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Not charging would invite more spam submissions, but deprive you of a revenue stream to fund outsourcing of moderation. But if payment is required before you even have to moderate submissions, that would minimize the amount of spam you'd even have to see.

I disagree that it would be wise in general to invest a lot of time in "expanding the core tech and business". I would have started working on http://WheresTheRemote.com/ sooner if I hadn't put it off waiting until I had time to build the application I envisioned in between client projects. Eventually I realized that the hard part was going to be attracting users / advertisers and that I could launch the site and just moderate and update it manually or semi-manually until / unless I had the welcome problem, as vaksel mentioned, of having too many ad submissions to keep up with. (Welcome if there are enough legit submissions, anyway.)

In any case, remote jobs are a niche market. There's an implied limitation on the number of ads that will be in play, so it probably makes sense to pace work on the technology according to the amount of interest / activity / revenue the site actually generates. In the beginning it might be most practical to just manually moderate submissions, and maybe implement something like CAPTCHA.

"Remote jobs" may be a larger niche than these discussions seem to assume.

"Remote technical jobs" is a niche that interests me (I found my current remote development job via HN) but "remote jobs" in general makes me think of all the spam email I get to get rich working from home (stuffing envelopes or jebus-knows-what-else). There's a huge difference between the high-powered developer who wants to live someplace beautiful and the out-of-work grocery store clerk who's reading the spam about "make thosandds from the comfort of you're own home" (and the "employers" targeting these people...).

With WheresTheRemote you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot a bit with the name; I wouldn't look to a site seemingly television-related for a technical job (to post one, or to find one). If you're actually looking for remote jobs of the sort that unskilled people can do while watching TV, you'll probably need to make it pretty cheap to post a listing (and regardless, certainly do something to get the ball rolling -- from the text on the front page, it seems like you don't have a single posting).

remote-jobs has some hints on the targeted niche based on the categories on the home page (seems closer to the HN remote listings, though it might help to explain your niche more explicitly).

Another thought on getting the ball rolling (for either site): what you really want is a set of really plum job listings in your niche that you can feature on the front page, and convince job seekers that there are good opportunities here (and job advertisers that they're on a site that is/will be attracting serious prospects). Maybe ask the employers with those great listings to self-select and contact you directly, and you'll post their positions for free?

In addition to what csomar said, for a small business or someone looking to hire an independent contractor, I think many advertisers would consider $425 to be a huge difference. But, I think a lot of potential advertisers would consider $75 significant in the first place.

But for me, charging advertisers a significant fee is valuable to establish that they're serious about hiring. That's the rationale behind the fee structure on my site http://WheresTheRemote.com/ . To me, an advertiser paying a fee of something like 1x or 2x the hourly rate they're advertising (for an independent contractor or employee, respectively) is a token of their sincerity about wanting to hire and pay the rate they advertise, which the site requires them to include in the ad. Conversely, unwillingness to pay such a fee makes me concerned that they would just waste the time of the job seekers visiting my site and I don't want to publish the ad, since quality is an important goal for my project. Of course, having a decent amount of traffic would help establish the value proposition for advertisers to pay such a fee.

Interesting discussion here. I've also been working on a remote jobs website: http://WheresTheRemote.com/. I've had the idea for years, but it "opened for business" last year. I've considered many of the issues raised here.

It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. Allowing free ads might help get the ball rolling, but I've resisted that since I'm concerned it will lead to low quality, which is one of the problems I have with other job sites. I don't want to hurt the site's reputation right out of the gate.

Moderation is one way to address that, but one of the core ideas of my site, which I think sets it apart from a lot of other job sites, is to require advertisers to include rate of compensation in their ads, and encourage accuracy by basing the fee for posting the ad on the advertised rate.

Trying to charge for something like this right off the bat without a lot of traffic is a difficult proposition, in my experience. But people seem to be willing to use mediocre web services and job sites, so allowing free ads to begin with, even if it results in low quality ads, might be a more realistic way to get something like this started.

So far I haven't compromised any of the original ideas for my site, but it hasn't gotten any traction either. I hoped that offering a money back guarantee would encourage a few advertisers to give it a shot and get the ball rolling, but so far that hasn't been enough. It's also difficult to figure out where / how to advertise something like this to even reach the right audience and make potential advertisers aware of it, at least without spending a ton.

If I'd known that all it takes to get people to start advertising jobs is to post the site on Hacker News, I would have done that months ago! I suspect that the activity on remote-jobs.com also has to do with the coupon offer though.

I'm considering making some changes to my site to get the ball rolling and then start charging or return to the original ideas for the site if and when there's enough traffic, as some have suggested. I don't think there's anything greedy about charging for such a service. If people are willing to pay it right off the bat, great, if not, that's another story. It might be more realistic to not charge or charge a small fee at first, and I agree that even charging a small fee would help to weed out the worst kind of posters who have free reign on some other sites.

I have problems with all of the job sites I've seen and the goal of my site is also to provide a better venue for finding remote jobs, and to try to level the playing field for job seekers, e.g. by requiring rate information in ads, backing that up with the fee structure, limiting the time ads are displayed moreso than most sites to reduce the opportunity for lazy or busy advertisers to waste job seekers' time with stale ads, etc.