Profitability of Forums

I was speaking about advertising. If you have 1,000 daily unique visitors, you should be able to find $300/month or so worth of advertising.

Don't discount the power of subscriptions, of course. Especially on a forum where people want to donate.

 

My forum started as a complete accident. A few of us were banned on a car forum, so i decided to start my own forum just so 10 of us could talk. Well, us 10 were very well watched people which the communities wanted to keep tabs on with what we were doing with our cars. Boom, i went from a godaddy hosting account, to needing a dedicated server 3 weeks later. I do pull a profit, but i put it back into the site. I spent a lot of url submissions, custom skins, etc. Im now ranked top on google for my niche and i do well.. This year has really exploded. Im well over 40,000 threads and 350,000 posts since being online since Feb of 08.

I put a lot of spin on the content from the beginning. I worked that forum for 10-16 hrs a day for well over 9 months so i could steer it the direction i wanted it. Unless you were the first to start a PS3 forum or something that is BIG for a huge community, just being able to break even while maintaining this hobby should be enough. However, if you ever get a peek at crackberry.com, i could only imagine how much profit that dude is pulling in a month.

 

I think that really depends on your niche/market

 

congratulations on what you've accomplished man

 

my forum is going to be for a hobby, and if I was to ever make money, it would be by pure chance lol . I enjoy the community on the forum, and everyone gives a good input and no-one takes offence, and we have managed to keep it that way, and laso with excellent banter. I have never imagined making money out of it, but who knows, maybe I will strike it rich by accident one day lol

 

I started my forum not to make money but recently it has been providing me some $$$ from AdSense. Not enough to make me a millionaire, but just enough to pay for the hosting

 

Hi all,

I found this site why looking at ways to improve ad placement for my forum and found had to reply to this thread as I also want to share my thoughts/ideas on this.

My forum started by accident as well. I originally started selling MP3/MP4 players and thought "I need a forum to support my buyers". I searched around and only found one site that really provided this kind of thing. However, found the forum was virtually 'dead' with very new replies etc... So I figured, I could do better. I started out with a $6.99/month hosting with GoDaddy and now 4 years down the track, I have two dedicated servers and a steady stream of income from my forum.

I think the thing that made my forum work well was:
1. Regular content
2. Ability to reply to posts and help others
3. Like the saying goes, "What goes around, comes around" so by helping people, others helped out too.
4. Most importantly, my site was FREE!


After a year, I decided to add in some Adsense and initially didn't get much at all. Now after four years, I have enough to pay for two dedicated servers and enough left behind to pay for prizes, upgrades to the site and other stuff.

The biggest thing that made my site profitable is my DOWNLOADS aread where members can download themes, mods for their players, Applications which helped them with their players. However, the forum doesn't bring in much income, it was the Downloads area that did. However, both go hand in hand - The Downloads wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for members in the forum to keep the site alive.

To reply to the original post, starting up a forum for the sole purpose of generating income is a BAD IDEA! People don't come to your site to just click on ads so you can make money! They come to find something useful and helpful and that's what forums are generally for - helpful information.

My advice to making ads work in a forum is to provide ads that COMPLIMENT and are relevant to your site as well as being 'useful' for your members - much like your forum is.

In my example, my site provides support for MP3/MP4 players, so I consistently look at the ads delivered by Google Adsense and filter out the cr*p ones are irrelevant. I also signed up to Affiliate programs and put ads which are relevant to my site - such as ones that sell MP3/MP4 players, accessories, music etc..... That way, the ads are actually relevant and turns out to be HELPFUL to my members as well so it works well.

Ok, I think I've written enough already and hope I haven't put anyone to sleep reading this! .

Thanks

 

^^ Wow, great post!