How far would you go in monetizing your forum?

Suppose you lost all other sources of income and HAD to make your forum very profitable in a hurry. How far would you go with your monetization efforts before you crossed ethical lines or started losing members left and right? Would you plaster each page with ads? Use pop-ups? Pop-unders?

 

I would never use popups or popunders since I know myself how annoying that is. And wouldn't put alot of ads on my site either since I hate that and its ugly one in the header and some in the sidebar and maybe in the footer but thats it.

 

What if it was a choice between trying popups and not making enough money to keep the place running for the next month? Would you go for the short-term gain and remove them as soon as you could?

 

That is really an hard question since I really hate thoose. I would probobly try to find some other solution but if its like you asked that I do not have any other choice then I might tell my members that I have to put that in for a while unless they donate some money.

 

If it was drastic and a one-time thing I'd ask for donations sincerely and see what I could offer in return. Otherwise I'd wonder how I got the bills that big and neglected on how to pay them.. I'd probably seek out sponsorships and other up-front type deals.

 

If I had to go the pop-route it'd be pop-unders as they're less intrusive

 

The user might not notice what site opened the pop-under.

 

I'd ask the community for donations before plastering the site with advertising.

 

hate to say it, but even better

you can usually notice a flash from a new window being opened though

 

That's probably the best way to go, especially if you tell them the dire financial straits you're in and that the only other solution will be to resort to more advertising.

 

I would first ask for donations and be honest with the community: if I can't get some sort of income, then the site will have to close down.

I would then resort to adding advertisements (Google AdSense) and perhaps discounting my main ad slots to liquidate them.

I would hate to, but if needed, would resort to pop-unders. They are less intrusive (in the short term).

That's a good thing -- then they don't know which site to blame and ultimately stop visiting.

 

I'd never use pop-ups, in-content textual ads. I rarely use affiliate stuff. I'll let the mod or admins use affiliate stuff in their signatures (sort of a perk) providing it's related. Dave (my only other admin on any of my forums) has an amazon books thing I setup for him and he has categories in it, so tiling books for the tiling forum, plumbing books for the plumbing forum, and so on. Though it doesn't get much for him at all really.

I think it can be very off-putting for a visitor (not just your members) to have every type of revenue generating thing on one website. I allow members to remove the google ads using a child template with no ads in it, then I link to it near the ads saying "click here to remove all Google ads". And the only other revenue thing I do is get sponsors. Related, well-known sponsors that bring the members benefits. And that really builds up trust with the regulars.

Checkout tilersforums.co.uk and see how we run the adsense on there. It's really working well from all angles (revenue, registered members don't get annoyed, one-hit wonders get the big ads, and often click them, but that's brilliant CTR).

Though all in all, even though I'm launching more forums all the time, since this recession lark my adsense has dropped off quite a bit.