Why do people even run/open admin forums?

It's an oversaturated niche with a whole ton of active forums to compete with (like this one), it's not one where forums end up very active on the whole (even the biggest admin forums rarely get more than fifty or a hundred posts a day), it requires a lot of work to make your forum even remotely popular since webmasters are generally more picky than average joes...

so why so many admin forums?

 

Cause everyone's an expert. Run one mildly successful community and all of a sudden you're an expert.

 

It kind of makes it depressing to visit admin forums, more trouble than it's worth recently tbh.

 

With the exception of this one right
I'll never be the way that says I'm a "social media expert" or "forum expert". There is always room to grow and things to learn online and from the experience of others.


cleaned up my the post, it was from my phone the first time

 

I agree with you. Too much drama on most of them as of recently. A lot of snippy remarks whenever an opinion is given.

 

It's like opening your own authority site. If you want to be well known in the niche or sector of the industry, you have to build a site around your expertise. If you want to tell other people "I have expertise in this space." You open an admin forum or similar sector forum. Like business forum, or webmaster forum, yadda yadda.

Especially if your end goal is to get a job in the desired industry. It's pretty crowded right now. It's like this, I wanted to be a video game magazine writer, but that opportunity is gone since the internet has taken over the industry by storm. I wanted to write for one of the most prestigious "magazine" like site - like I said, that space is crowded [with veterans and whatnot]. So, I started a gaming network to begin this path, but that turned into "I want to start my own business."

Here I am today.

 

Well, since I am in love with this niche, I'd be happy if there were at least 30 other admin forums. I'd be present in all of them

The niche is saturated because many think that just opening a forum is enough. And it's actually one of the most difficult niches, you need to know what you're doing and you need to invest time and money to make it a success. I opened mine 8 months ago and most of the forums that started in the niche that time are no longer active (closed, sold, merged). It says A LOT about how difficult is to actually get a site running in this niche.

 

Tbh, this is the only admin forum I'm currently on I would find it hard to dedicate the time to contribute to too many online communities at this point in time.

 

Same thing happens in the SEO industry. Not too many people know what they're doing. Same thing with Admin Forums, there's only a few that are ran by community experts.

You also have to take in account that a lot of admin forums' members are running their own communities so it takes time for them to actually respond and interact sometimes. Some are lucky to have a lot of daily activity, its all about your members and the content that you offer.
Sure, the niche is over-saturated that's because everyone wants to try their luck and see what they're capable of doing. Gaming forums are the same way, people have some ideas and want to see where it leads them. There's nothin wrong with testing the market. You either succeed or you don't, its called learning, right?

 

I used to love admin forums but just recently, I noticed that many new admin forums are popping out of nowhere. I tried visiting some of them and the topics are just the same such as "how to make your forum profitable", "different ways of making money online", "how to drive traffic to your site", etc.

 

The blogging industry is very similar to what's going on with a lot of Admin forums. It's crazy to think that some people care more about quantity than quality. At least, that's how I see it. Those type of topics are usually started by people looking to learn, and they don't research the forum to see if there's another thread up like it. Which is why, spammers seems to be winning on most sites. So wrong, isn't it?

 

The thing is, Google and other search engines are slowly catching up. In the long run, quality pays off much better than quantity. If you want to make a quick buck, quantity is going to get you there, but for a sustainable forum or blog, quality is what really counts.

 

What's worse is when they *haven't* even run a mildly successful community. I hate when I see someone open an admin forum and it's the only time they've been an admin.... I can't tell if maybe they think the community will teach them or if they just think it's easy or what.

 

Ya, I actually wonder how many admin forums were hit hard by Google's recent updates. It seems that the quality sites are in it to win, where the lack of quality on certain sites, are making their rankings go down or disappear. But, that's expected isn't it?

 

Meh, I think the real problem hitting forum admin sites now is that their key search terms are so generic. I mean, what do I search for to find admin forums? If I type admin forum, I get a million irrelevant results with admin in the title. Forum admin forum seems ridiculous, no one really uses community admin...

Interestingly, at least one of the boards I linked to in the other topic wasn't found in the first four pages of results, so I guess they were hit pretty hard...

 

Maybe the niche is really profitable that they are creating webmasters forum every now and then. Some of them aren't actually the same as we thought, some of these forum are focused on coding like learning html, php and the rest. Some forums are focus on SEO and some just General Webmasters Forum.

Do some of you ever have a favorite admin forum?

 

My favorite used to be Sitepoint back in the day, which was a good webmaster forum. Probably still is, I've just haven't been there in a while. I liked Theadminzone too for a while there until I found this place. I still check into TAZ from time to time and see if I can help anyone out.

But, to answer your question, this place is my favorite because I work here.

 

Sitepoint was a good forum once, but since a while back it's been overrun by spam and fluff posts that don't add much to the conversation. Heck, even their staff team wrote an announcement about how they were supposedly cracking down on it.

But it's still a nice enough site, and I also check it out every now and then. TAZ too, but it's honestly not much more active than any other admin forum now and it sometimes feels like it's not worth the effort.

 

Heck, what happened was when Digitalpoint's forums opened and Sitepoint's forums went straight on the decline. That's another reason as to why Sitepoint's forums aren't as active as it was back 2005-2006 ish or earlier one.

There's also the Warrior Forum, its more of an affiliate/webmaster community, but its popular as well.

 

Many admins I know only manage sites because they want to make money out of them. I'm not judging them, but I prefer to be on a site where an admin doesn't do his job just because he's getting paid, but rather because he enjoys doing it for whatever reason. Say I really like a TV show, become a huge fan, and then open a forum. Some other guy "steals" my idea and opens a similar site, but with the sole purpose of money-making. Which site would you rather join?