Do you make or lose money from your forum?

I'm curious: does your website make money, lose money, or break even?

What are your sources of income? Expense?

For us, we typically break even each month, but keep a consistent surplus in order to remain comfortable on a rainy day.

Income:

• Google Ads
• Donations
• Book royalties

Expenses:

• VPS Hosting
• Paid Modifications
• Promoting the site on Facebook ads (we spend by far the most on this)

Basically, we just spend all extra money on the promotions - so we're never making money, because that's not our goal.

What about you?

 

I tried having a forum once with chikita advertisements but that really hadn't worked out. I couldn't get enough traffic to go to the site, but really might change the whole concept of it and try something totally different. Adsense is pretty good in the way of having ads on it and then you can always have where you get members to pay to open specific areas of the forum like a supporter would and what they do is make donations and have special features like having a signature or something along those lines. There are a ton of free places to place that forum though, it takes a lot of work and dedication because you want people to visit and so there has to be effort given.

 

My forum isn't generating any income at the moment, so I'm losing about $5 a month, which I don't mind, because the main focus right now is to build my community, and the money will come when we get big.

 

We do not make any money and even refuse donations, as they could be seen to compromise our independence.

The site is definitely a not for profit venture. The costs are paid by us as volunteers.

 

I was thinking about using Kontera or Vibrant Media ads once my community starts generating 10k pageviews on a daily basis. Right now, I'm at 8,000-8,500 pageviews per day. I used Kontera in the past and averaged $2/day. This was back in 06 or 07.

 

Since it is all a big hobby for me I'm not making money from it and don't even had any type of ads on my two main sites.

 

Google ads is a no-no to me because they simply don't pay, at least not to me since my account got trapped into their interface change about 2 years and they cannot resolve the problem with my account yet, so not delivering the money that keep accruing and has surpassed the minimum withdrawal threshold shortly before the infamous change.

So my forum revenue mostly comes from webmaster-related sponsorship, but since I have several different types of websites, my global income an global expenditure varies significantly but I'm not really making much money from them, and expenses are paid with what I earn doing other activities online.

 

I deffintley loose money as all the expeses are paid out of pocket, we are a local automotive forum in a city of about 100,000 with the only advertising for the forum being word of mouth. There are about 400 members with about 70 of them being active.

Income:

• Google Ads
• Donations

Expenses:

• Shared Hosting
• Paid Modifications

 

Anyone eBay partner network for more revenues?

 

I have two. One below the navbar and one above the footer.
I'm not an AdSense expert so any advice is appreciated. I'm not seeing the 4 ads you speak of.

 

My forums make money but im not making aton. I really would like to make a steady nice income off of google adsense but my earnings are pretty inconsistent for some reason. I think im going to explore independent buyers for advertisements soon for I wont have to worry about adsense.

 

Thanks for pointing that out @BamaStangGuy , when I load the page it's only loading two ads for me at the bottom instead of the four in your screen shot. I will try to fix this ASAP. I was also not aware that you are only supposed to have 4 adsense ads per page - as you mentioned in your previous post. Any other tips you can share for the use of adsense on my forum?

 

I went ahead and re-vamped my AdSense placement (since quickly setting them up a year ago). I now have 3 banner style ads, all of them above the fold(right below the navbar). The ads are only showed to guests. My monthly revenue ranges from $3-$10 with the average ~$5. Hopefully, this now improves.

Can you take a look and tell me what you think?

 

I'm making $200 a month from one of my sites on AdSense. It helps with the VPS cost.

 

How much are your VPS costs? How much ram do you have?

 

I'm paying $49 a month right now. But, I need to upgrade...

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