Have you ever noticed that the forums tend to always turn into a site's focus?

Seriously. Almost every site I've seen with forums (which caught on) has ended up with the forums becoming far more popular and successful than the actual site it's usually been added too. Just look at Digitalpoint for example, no one actually ever used the non forums part there, and Shawn pretty much eventually took it down and made the domain redirect to the forum portal instead.

And other examples are numerous. More people use Something Awful's forums than the main site. More people use Smash Boards than used to use the site it was the official forums to.

So yes, anyone else noticed this? How the forums usually end up as the main focus on the site they're on after a very short amount of time?

 

There's definitely a tendency for this to happen, but sometimes it backfires.

Not to drag the SitePoint discussion here too... but some niches are prone to a really crappy signal to noise ratio. The official blogs or whatever else the content is is obviously going to have much richer content (or content curation).

In my last community, the focus point was a league. The community completely dominated it, but the league was still active. It was the hook, but the community kept people around for nearly a decade. Mind you... gaming content is usually very immature, riddled with trolls and silly pictures. But, it worked.

 

@AWS
But see Commenting on a site vs Posting on a forum, I view differently.

Is it possible these forums take off from a site's focus simply because a forum empowers users to have more control of discussion as far as not only responding to Created content but creating their own? I think a lot of the reasons forums wind up taking over a site's focus is because it allows your community to better connect & relate to one another vs the standard site.

 

Not entirely accurate... Our forum started in large part because we needed a support venue for the users of our products and tools. And believe it or not this is still the case. For example we have the largest historical search engine ranking tracking system out there... https://tools.digitalpoint.com/tracker

I wouldn't really say that it being used by close to 100,000 users is "no one".

Our marketplace is fairly popular as well (around 4,500 domains for sale at any given time)... https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/

Also, there is no "forum portal". The only thing that makes what we have a "forum portal" any more than the previous site is that it uses the same general look and feel. But it's not like there are threads or posts or anything else forum related there. The *real* reason it was changed was simply because 17 years with the same design (really) is more than enough. lol This is what it looked like in the 1990s... https://web.archive.org/web/19991104104556/http://www.digitalpoint.com/

...and this is what it looked like in 2013... https://web.archive.org/web/20130118192807/http://www.digitalpoint.com/

While the forum has the most pageviews of any part of the site, it doesn't have the most unique visitors. Other areas of the site just don't have millions of pages of content for bored people to go through. People find what they are looking for and move on.

 

I won't let that happen with my site. However, right now the forums are the main focus, but I plan expand on the success I've gotten with my forum community, and add on to it with unique features that will get users visiting my site for many different reasons.

 

I have noticed this a lot as well. I try to recommend that the site owners just go to purely forums. I mean you can add portals these day that can get the job done that your once static site does. StormTrack used to be a storm chaser magazine at one time, they had a huge library of static pages telling all about chasing, their magazines and what not. Then they added a forum and it became what StormTrack is today. Of course it is kind of dead now but so is the weather it seems >_>

 

This happen on my site
Once I open a forum, my site's visitors spend most of their time on the forum than on the actual site. They even rarely visit my site again, just hanging on the forum for hours everyday.

In my case, its happen because they found forum is more interactive than the actual site. They could find new friends, ask some questions, get their problems solved, open a discussion, becoming popular, etc.

Now the forum is my (and my visitors) main focus because the activity mostly happen on forum