Do you think your competitors have joined your forum?

I generally don't take an interest in what my "competitors" are doing, because at this point they're really no threat to my site. But I have been on staff at other forums where I'd notice a competitor had joined to check the place out. Have your competitors been sniffing around your forum? How did you know it was them; did they make any attempt to hide their presence or were they easily identified?

 

Yes they have, but funny thing, only to ask me to make them a MyBB forum skin for their own forum or me to provide them how did I make the graphics. :lol:

 

Nah, my competitors have better things to do then mess with my tiny operation.

 

I run the two largest communities in my niche. Several have split from my forums. I don't think, I know : )

 

Yes and on a daily basis, we see a lot of traffic coming from India where our main competitor lives and obviously we dont really target India being an English site but in Analytics we get quite a few hits from his city each month. Might not be him but I think it is.

Were pretty sure theyve signed up, some make it blatant by using their domain name or advertising it within their intro threads asking people to join and some tend to view new updates each week.

 

At first, no, they were not concerned with my forum.

But now, yes, I know for a fact that some of my competition has joined my site.

 

We got it the same but they did become interested very early on

 

Quite a few of my "competitors" have joined my designs site over the 4 yrs since I opened it. I'm friends with all of them, so I welcome them. We tend to learn things off of each other, so I really don't even look at it as competition.

 

lol...

About a month or so ago we had a total 'war' going on...it was so childish...my members were trying to steal members from one of our competitors (flattering? yes. childish? also yes) and it got ugly...so the other sites main admin and myself got together and made it clear to our members and staff that this nonsense will stop now..or bans will start to come out. Within a day or two it all stopped.

It got so ugly tho...

the kicker..is that my little site was going up against a site with a million+ posts..lol...and for sum reson they felt threatened...idk why either...

 

My competition is so far off that there's no need for them to check mine out I did check my competition out though, but lost interest cause theirs was so "boring".

 

My biggest competitor is Internet Brands...

Lets see..my site has 615 members, their site in the same space had over 65,000

I started in May, the competitor has been around since 02.

Some days I feel like it's a canoe going up against a Battleship.

 

Gnatster, a canoe has the advantage of maneuverability over a battleship, as does your forum: you can identify and respond faster to your niche's needs than they ever could.

 

I invited my competitors. Some joined, some lurk, but the lurkers can't access the pros only forums. Some just aren't interested and it shows in their own forums.

Jim

 

Yes, and this is how I keep ahead right now. Plus I can roll out new features a lot faster and usually of a much better quality too. Just added a new one that is a killer app to the site sponsors. There is a key word feature that allows them to create keywords then every night a job is run. The sponsor gets has an email in their in box the next morning with direct links to the posts where their keywords were used.

That site I compete with, aka "that other site" is my largest source of traffic too. Many of my members are from there and often drop links to my site in their posts. It's just a matter of time as "that other site" is now poorly managed, not well moderated and is filling with ad out of the niche market. I've been winning over 1-2 new sponsors from there a month.

 

Inviting your competitors, now that's an interesting concept eJM! But it does make sense... imagine what members with "dual citizenship" think when they see them on your forum and then mentally compare the two sites.

 

Some of them have, yes, at least from one site I know. I haven't really looked into the other ones. A great deal of our members came from one of our competitors so there's some sort of back and forth bickering here and there. The administration at what I would call our main competitor is pretty weak, but they've been in the game a long time.

 

One of my admins has afoot in both camps being being an admin on the competitors site as well.

 

We are the biggest in our little area, and yes membes of our "competitor" forums are openly members of us (and we are members of thier forums). In fact, a couple of months ago, the lead admin on one site just got fed up of running his forum and pulled it without warning one evening. We "harboured" the lost souls for a week or two while they sorted out a rescue for their own forum.

 

We had one competitor lurking and quietly copying ideas from our forum, but mostly people just sign up like normal members.

Some of our best members are also our competitors.

 

Ezactly!

That I don't allow. One of my moderators became a mod on a competitor's site, so I made him a "Moderator Emeritus" on mine (I use rank icons, or as my members refer to them, badges). So, he became visible as a former moderator with honor, but no longer had any mod power or access to the staff forum where we discuss strategy and policy. It would be a conflict of interest.

Jim