What’s your forum’s main source of income?

What’s your main source of income on your forum?

I realise this will be far from a full list of options, but if it's something different then just choose other.


If you choose other, then please provide some info as to how you make money.

My forum hasn't earned anything yet, but we have affiliate links in the header banner, and on our poker bonuses page, but none of the clicks have converted into members yet.

Well, I also haven't earned anything off mine yet and I use infolinks on it. I think I still need to improve the SEO and I really need to advertise it since I'm kind of in the lowest point right now. Minimum to no traffic whatsoever.

I'm not managing any sites as of right now, but back in the days when I did, donations were our main source of income. We were on a free host who even provided us a GoDaddy domain for our activity (we had a large member database and about 100-150 new posts a day). There were a few anonymous donors who were truly generous. And yup, you heard it right, anonymous! They weren't registered in our site, yet they donated large amounts of money to us. We were just plain lucky.

We also had a store where we sold custom services like Facebook Pages tabs coded from scratch. I worked on that project together with a programmer who did the hardest part of coding and I did the design. We then used the money to advertise on different sites, but that wasn't a good investment really

What happened to this site now? It seems like its really promising. Considering the fact that the hosting is free and you still get donations, its very profitable if you ask me. May I ask why did you leave the site?

Merchandise seems like a good move. I can't think of the name off hand, but I'm sure there's a website (no doubt multiple) that will add your images to t-shirts, mugs ect and then handle all the shipping ect whilst giving you a cut of the profit.

It was promising, but activity dropped after a while and those magic donors disappeared as well. I left because the site was taking too much time off my hands. I had a few free hours during weekdays (around 3-5) and spend, at worst, 2 hours on it, daily. It began being a hobby and it ended up being some kind of job. That, along with some problem with my staff members, made me leave for good and leave my co-admin in charge.

... although I totally regret not having sold the site to someone else It's pretty much dead now.

^
Yes, you should have sold it. Well, lets just let bygones be bygones. Your not planning on managing another forum again? or maybe sometime in the future? It looks like you know how to pretty much handle a forum properly, seeing that you've handled a big one before.

I am looking to sell adspace on my forum. I have linkshare on the site right now until those spaces are sold. If anyone wants to advertise their forum on my site let me know.

My pocket

Seriously now, banner ads are the way we can get some of the investment back (pretty little, but it's a start).

I just replied to @Brandon's PM, but I doubt you guys may be interested :p It's on Forumotion, a piece os software that doesn't allow database access and most webmasters call limited. It still can be converted to phpBB or some other software, but I never had the guts to do that

And as I mentioned to him, I'm no the owner anymore, but I can contact the current owner if you guys want. I thought he'd do better than he did in the end

Google's Adsense is my primary source of income, but I've also added VigLink into the picture.

I want to get into that whole "renting ad space" but my sites aren't at that level, yet.