Forums Dying?

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

Scott

 

Posted in wrong thread, can you delete this.

 

The waiting list of constantly growing large forum clients wanting to hire me for forum server performance optimisation work proves that forums aren't dying but continuingly are growing and evolving

But yes some forums depending on the topic do die off, i.e. forums centered around a specific tv series in it's prime would grow but after tv series ends or gets cancelled, the forums eventually die off too.

 

Forums aren't dying there's just more competition/saturation (with any type of site, not just forums). At the end of the day if your website isn't solving a problem for end users and giving them something they want that they can't already get elsewhere, it's going to be tough.

Same general concept applies to all websites though, not just forums.

 

Forums aren't dying, yours might. But mine will always keep growing, because I'll always be the owner, and I put a lot of value on myself. I'll never let it decline, and always keep making progress.

 

I think that forums are as alive as ever currently.

There really isnt an alternative

 

I think what we are seeing is forum software companies competing. Some will, some will lose. This is also a good indication that forums are not going anywhere. If the software companies thought it there was no potential there wouldn't be so much competition.

 

Honestly I can say that I was hoping to be on that list, I had a forum myself that I am still in possession of but don't like to bloat about anymore, our first two months had an amazingly surprising uprise in users that surprised even the largest of forums. We were a general niche board and we were aiming for success as a community driven board, but as a first time owner, I made a mistake with forum software, first & last time I'd make that mistake, our forum died out & we're waiting to have a financial base to attempt to give it heart surgery and hope that we can revive it, since it's on life support right now.

With that said, I've also seen nearly 3 dozen other forums around us fall & fail, even forums that were making it big with a steady incline of users and posts, suddenly fell and crashed.

With all these forums falling, I wouldn't be surprised if forum platforms start losing money, it takes the want of owning a board away for a lot of people.

 

Mine is certainly not i currently own a gaming site which reached 250 posts in 3 days so not really, but what is your site about like the niche?

 

I don't think that's true. I am a member to several different forums. They aren't exactly high traffic but they are doing well and staying alive just fine.

 

I don't think forums are dying. It's just that there are lots of competition and it's harder for forums to succeed. But the truth is that forums are widely used. A good proof that forums are doing just fine is that if you search something on any search engine chances are one of the first results will be a forum.

 

I too don't believe forums are dying and it is the forum type of discussion, especially where people are helping people, which makes the Internet so valuable.

Scott

 

If honest, I find these type of "are forum boards dying" threads bias posted on a forum. Reason being, everybody posting in it, and especially so on an admin niche site. Are all mostly forum owners themselves, so it's a bit like posting is XenForo the best forum software (on XenForo) - you already known the result most will say.

Most forum owners will say no, they are not dying. Because they don't like to say yes, knowing they run a forum themselves and would be a bit self-defeating saying that. What I say, is go look around at many forums out there, get a bigger picture of how many are active, how many are not.

Depends on what you call active as well, to me an active forum is one like Digital Point or Admin Zone (getting regular posts made). I wouldn't call a forum getting one post every 4-6 hours an active forum.

 

To be fair, I don't think a significant amount of forums being inactive means forums are dying.

After all, go look around the internet some time, and I guarantee you'll find that most websites in general are dead or fairly inactive. Blogs? Thousands of dead/abandoned ones use up space on services like Wordpress.com or Blogger. Social networks? At least 80% of non Twitter/Facebook ones are dead/never caught on in the first place. Wikis? Tons and tons of inactive ones can be found online, based on every possible subject imaginable (and usually on wikia).

Every type of website has tons of dead/dying/inactive examples. It's just kind of the nature of competition, some succeed, many fail. Add how forums (along with blogs, wikis and other types of community focused sites) have become extremely easy to set up by people who are neither tech savvy nor particularly invested in the community and you're gonna get today's situation.

There's no real difference in how many of the world's forums are active compared to how many of the world's blogs are popular or how many of the world's wikis are brimming with updates and edits. Maybe about 1% of sites in any niche or based around any concept do well. It's just how things work.

 

So what does this tell you? It tells me that people are not interested in forum/websites the way they once were. Wind the clock back to 2003~2008 and almost any new forum was a success.

Greg

 

Please tell me you're joking and don't honestly believe nearly every site/forum was a success.

Seriously, I distinctly recall a hell of a lot of forums and websites not catching on or dying off very fast back in 2007, 2005, the 1990s... Indeed, some of them were competitors to my previous forum. And I remember at least one by name, as well as the mere 30 odd members it got in about two years.

Forums have never been a 'launch it and become an immediate success' thing.

 

Yeah, I can't agree completely with your comment either Gregman. I sold forum licenses through those years and to me a successful forum was because of the exact same reasons they can be successful right now. Good content and good usability. I just think the difference now is the chaff is starting to get picked out from the wheat by users and if you have a "chaffy" forum/ online community with poor content and poor usability, you'll simply loose out in the end and many are.

Scott

 

Well that may depend on the niche. I'm a member (not very active lately but a member still) of a music forum and I know it started making a lot of money from the ads the admin was displaying there just a couple of months after he launched the forum.

Of course that's a very specific example but I'm sure there must be tons of forums that aren't earning a single penny. Just like there are blogs that are very successful and some others that are about of being abandoned because the owners aren getting any revenue.

 

250 posts is 3 days? Is that supposed to be impressive? I don't consider that to be active to be honest. It sounds like your forum is just getting started, good luck with that. My niche is poker, and I'm relaunching my forum in a few days. We have 3800 posts currently.

 

To be fair, success is relative. And 250 posts in 3 days, while not massive for an established forum, is decent enough for a 3 day old one (heck, it's more per day than the likes of Admin Talk or any other admin forum I'm a member of at the moment is getting. And more than what a lot of BIG gaming sites are now getting)

I wouldn't say that's so much the general niche as much of a specific forum thing. Forums go up and down activity wise in different ways, even in the same market with similar content.

Additionally, ad money does not always equal activity, since it's quite possible to make decent money off ads on a completely inactive website. See, Internet Brands.

Also, one more thing to the 'websites were more active' guy:

What was considered active early on was different to what's considered active now.

Seriously, go back in time to the 90s or early 00s and look at the forums on a lot of 'big' sites (or at least one considered 'big'). They often only had less than 50 000 posts and one thousand members!

Indeed, early Zelda/Pokemon/Final Fantasy/other fan sites and their forums generally had an interesting side in that what was seen as active/mega popular then would arguably be quite niche now. Got over one thousand members? You were basically seen to have 'made it' in the days of yore. Same with more than 30 or so thousand posts. One hundred thousand? That was almost 'big board' criteria in the 90s or so...

I think (and I'm going to make a seperate thread about it here and elsewhere soon), the general 'scale' of a forum has changed, the perception of what's active and what isn't. People have got used to sites being at the Facebook/Twitter 'every two seconds = a new post' activity level. Hence why they seem to think forums are less active.