Are adding forums worth it?

[rlkanter]

I'm considering adding forums to my site, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with the revenue their site brought in pre/post a forum addition.

My site is a content based one, and although there are other forums out there that cover a similar topic, I think the traffic my site receives and some of the feedback I've gotten shows the usefulness of one.

I know that forums have low ctr's and a lot of cpm based programs don't allow ads on forums, so it comes back to my orginal question, is it worth it? Do they make enough to cover the bandwidth cost and time it takes to maintain? Thanks.

[ASFx2600]

If you think you'll be able to pull in a good amount of users to the forum, then I think it would be a very good thing. There's lots of ways you could use that traffic to make up for the extra amount of time you would spend moderating it.

[rogerd]

rlkanter, a lot depends on the purpose of your site. Forums CAN generate lots of traffic, both in repeat visits and in search engine traffic. If the forum supports the rest of the site by bringing back customers or bringing in new ones, it can be worth it.

If you are expecting the forum to be self-supporting, I'd be cautious. You can almost certainly generate enough ad revenue to cover the server and bandwidth costs, but there's a lot of time involved in moderation and community building.

[BookCollector]

Hello

I am new to the forums, and so I will say a big Hello to everyone.

I think with regards to adding forums to a site, this is the best thing I did to my site. My site focus's on selling collectable books, and when I made the site live in Jan 03 nothing happened for 6 whole months. I added the forums in August, and what a difference that made, traffic went up by 80%, search engines spidered the results and bingo I started gettting sales.

Okay I am still not earning much, but enough to keep the site going and buy more collectable items. Hopefully in a couple of years this will be a good full time job.

Just thought I share my little story

Cheers

Ivan

[rlkanter]

Thanks for the responses. I'll probably look at adding forums soon :)

[rogerd]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, BookCollector, and thanks for sharing your experience. It's nice to hear about a forum boosting traffic and sales on a site that didn't have much going prior to the forum; conventional wisdom is that you have to have quite a bit of site traffic to start with in order to launch a forum. Perhaps at some point, BC, you'd like to start a new thread about how you launched and promoted the forum.