What type of forums do you feel are the hardest to start up?

In my experience I believe general chat, and gaming forums are the hardest to start up - especially with not a lot of funds to back them up. But, what do you think?

 

I'd say promotion forums as you need a lot of time patience and coding skills to run the services, etc. it's not that hard to install a forum software, style, set up your forums and post compared to coding & updating services, etc.

 

My local forum has been hard going but its slowly picking up steam.

 

^^This. I see many promotion forums struggle to even just so much as get their name in the door, and I myself almost went with the promotion genera because it would be more stimulating than other generas, but then I thought of all the problems sites like Forum Promotion and another advert forum I used to frequent had, and decided not to go along with the idea. General Chat is another one that's tough to get off the ground: Too many people want to be on forums with a specific niche these days, not sites where you can talk about everything. However, I chose this genre because I prefer small forums over big active ones, and really, I'm just glad I did too, because there isn't as much work involved as there is with a promotion forum.

 

Gaming forums are really hard to start up too. It's an absolutely saturated medium, and there's no way you'll be able to compete with the big sites like Gamespot, NeoGAF, or IGN. Most gaming forums don't even make it past the first month or so, and even the ones that do take forever to get off the ground.

 

I'd saying Gaming forums as well. I've started quite a few and to be honest none of them got far at all. You aren't going to get anywhere with gaming forums if you don't have a pretty site with nice features. People looking for gaming forums get bored fast.

 

Great reply - why do you think its so hard to compete against them? Is it because the lack of money, and staff to do it? Personally, I've seen a lot of gaming forums go down 0ver the past few years, and some make it to 20k posts, and then stop growing.

 

initally I think any forum. However, it can and does get better but then your niche comes into play. If your setting up a game forum then you have to find away to stand out which is extremely hard thing to do.

 

I would defiantly say promotion forums are the tougher to setup and get going. There are so many medium and huge sized ones that the smaller ones are ignored completely due to activity. It's a tough spot to fill unless you offer something unique.

 

I would say web hosting forums, aimed at that industry are hard to get going.

 

why would you say that?

 

Just due to the amount that are out there, I am on one thats been open quite some time and it is still slow getting going, the main one is WHT which is mega active.

 

I'd pretty much agree. Especially general forums.

 

Well, sometimes you can offer competitions to get the ball rolling. I don't see why so many people want to own a promotion forum. For what exactly? Its just users going back and forth talking about their community, and trying to lure members from the promotion forum to theirs.

 

A forum with a very unpopular niche won't be popular at all.

 

With the rise of Facebook, those that want to speak their minds either have a blog, or a youtube. Facebook brought about the rise of the brands, in other words, those "individual" sites, as in a blog, a website, or a youtube.

A company needs to come forward with a forum software that can push that kind of market postensity as facebook. The downfall of vBulletin is the opportunity that is anyone's game right now.

 

Well, I'm still a fan of vBulletin 4. The facebook connect feature is quite nice though. You're right that more people are making "individual sites", but they're also making youtube videos - which replace regular content that we're used to seeing. It's not really the software though, its the flow of content, and the community that really matters. You can have fancy forum software all you want, but you won't be anything without members and content.