Do you make or lose money from your forum?

Yeah, when I first started my forum, I wasn't making any money at all even with adverts especially since my Google adverts are banned.

But, my expenses are:
Hosting
Domains
Themes

But income would be:
A little bit from adverts.
Donations
VIP membership

 

I have read that many of you take donations as a part of you income, and I don't see anything wrong with it.

However I have found that many webmasters take donations as an "offensive" option.

I have never understood why, but I'm glad to see many of you don't because I see it like a reward received from members who are satisfied with one's work.

 

As we are an anti-fraud website we do not take donations or any other form of income. So yes we do lose our own money to run the website.

In our case, if we accepted donations there could be a perception of partiality if we posted something good on the entity who donated.

Perhaps other webmasters have similar concerns?

For a non anti-fraud website, I cannot see any reason that the owner who has invested his/her time and money into the site should not be compensated for their efforts, as long as "favours" are not unduly assigned to the person or group who donates, to the detriment of others who may be more deserving but who have not donated money.

 

I dislike ads so i don't have ads on my site but yeah i run the site at a loss paying for hosting each month....

I always feel that ads take away from the site's productivity. I'd never be able to get donations from my members though(not that i would ask) because the average member is 14-17.

no wonder, I get so frustrated with my staff lol....i literally get zero return back xD

 

How do you do that? Hah. I'd presume by having a high traffic forum. What's the subject matter of your forum?

 

Discussion of Trucks.

I keep an average of 25+ members and 100+ Guests. I have 500K posts.

 

Nice! What's the link to your forum? I'd like to check it out. I run a local automotive forum for my city of ~100K population. We have about 70 active members and almost 12K posts.

 

It'll have to be a high traffic forum with good ad placement. Using Kontera or Vibrant Media is another way to generate extra income. Especially if you have a lot of content, good rankings and a lot of daily pageviews.

 

I've been showing Adsense to guests using @digitalpoint ad placement mods and making halfway decent scratch with it.

 

When I first started off my site sites I would always lose money. Then about two months in I started to earn enough to pay for hosting. Then it just kept increasing where I would have $100 profit. Ran into some problems and couldn't manage the sites anymore. Now, I am back and hope to get to where I was before.

The way I earned with my sites was through adsense, media.net, and paid advertisement.

 

I had a few boxes with servint. However it is the only company ever where I had a catastrophic


As for me. I make income from almost all my sites with the exception of my xF ones which are dead. LOL.

 

I usually earn something, because money is my main motivation, and that's what I strive for. If my incomes can't cover my outcomes I change the things around or if that doesn't work, sell the forum/site. But that happened only two times, and that was when I was inexperienced.

 

The purpose of the forum itself is not always to bring the profit. Sometimes, you sacrifice profit for an investment in branding. I don't know if others call it that. I feel that a forum which brings in regular readers builds trust with the name, and to me that is branding. Now, if you can profit from the site through ads and other methods WHILE building trust, community and a reader/customer base, you are on the right track.

 

I'm of the mindset where if it isn't supporting itself, the market says it shouldn't exist. Now, that said, there is certainly a ramp-up period in the beginning, and there might be some rocky times, but anything that can't pay for itself is a drain.

 

Branding is all I'm about with my online community. I'm trying to build a brand name and household name, so we need to increase our members online and we'll start earning even more money from advertisements when our traffic increases. Currently, we charge $45 a month for advertisements on the forum.

 

My forum does not make any money. I have sold some ads but not two many. I have been open for a year and a half. I sold enough to cover about 5 months of hosting. I have spent money on advertising and so on. I need to increase my traffic and member base.

James

 

My forum is completely free of ads, but it's "only" hosted on a 30GB webspace. So I pay about 3€ a month for hosting and twenty € a year for both domains, (I will buy the second one today or on weekend) and about 100€ for the WBB3 with Space Styles and paid plugins.

Because there aren't any ads, I don't make any money with my forum

 

How do you plan on increasing your user base and traffic? Where do you advertise at? Have you ever tried Project Wonderful or anything similar to it? I wish you nothin but the best of luck with increasing your traffic and user base.

 

I'm wondering who is making real money here with it's forum(s).

I have one forum that exists for almost 13 years now and the last 5 years I earn 100.000 euro+ with it each year. I'm almost at 1.000.000 euro with just that particular forum.

Now you are wondering, how? Forget Adsense because that is just a laugh. Google is squeezing your balls and still laughing in your face when doing it. I really don't understand people still use Google Adsense while they could earn way more.

The key is (besides having a forum with content and traffic without Adsense or other ad network running!) to get in contact with the advertisers directly. As long as they can get on your site using Adsense they will not pay you any cent directly, but if there isn't any other option than buy from you directly and your forum is interesting to them they will pay you and they will pay you good money. Way more than Adsense will ever pay you even before they take their ehm rightful share.

Please people, stop giving money to Google and start contacting potential advertisers directly!

If you want to know more about my forum just let me know.
EDIT: http://admin-talk.com/threads/most-revenue-youve-made-in-one-year.6431/page-2#post-575229

 

I would never sell my community. I have too much passion and love for it.