Do you make or lose money from your forum?

Lose money and will be for a long time, would never sell it either.

 

Posted this on TAZ some time back:

As of today i only have two vBulletin 3 licenses but what costs have i made to use the two vBulletin 4 Suite licenses.

I will exclude the vBulletin 3 licenses these aren't that important, because the where low cost and was easy to earn income to pay for hosting and licenses.

First there was the cost to obtain the licenses i got one at 130 dollars and the second was 270 dollars. When i got the licenses i bought a new styling that was 125 dollars for both licenses. I also bought some scripts as custom work that i needed that was not expensive around the 50 dollars. The second big investment that i needed to do was a new server the old sever that i used for the vBulletin 3 licenses was to slow for even one vBulletin 4 license, so a new dedicated server was needed that costed 14 dollars in the month more for two years that's 336 dollars.

So that's:
$130
$270
$050
$125
$336

With a total of 911 dollars to run two licenses for two years.

But it was not all loss i soled the licenses and i made some cash on ads. Ads in the two years was between the 350 to 400 dollars. Soled one license for 90 dollars and another at 100 dollars. Also soled one website excluding the vBulletin license because that person all ready had access to vBulletin 4 for 140 dollars.

So that's
$400
$090
$100
$100

That totals to 690 dollars.


All in all vBulletin 4 costed me 221 dollars to run in two years i consider myself lucky it could be worse much worse as we have seen and heard.

Before vBulletin 4 it was easy money with vBulletin 3 but because they released a version that was not made for small VPS servers especially the earlier versions you needed to invest in a dedicated server lucky i could get it cheap else it would be much worse.

I bought the second license after vBulletin said they would improve the script. To bad that list never made it into the script it was a year later that we heard that vBulletin was not going to improve the script like Fabian said.

Would i ever choose vBulletin again well not as long as Internet Brands has control over vBulletin. They cost me money and that is not something i take lightly. I'am better off investing money in Invision Powered Board and making it my own it has everything vBulletin has and much much more.

 

How much do you lose every month while running your community? How come you don't think it'll be profitable for awhile?

 

I don't loose each month just when I buy new styles or addons, none of the sites are doing very well at the moment so a profit is long way off.