Is forum traffic worthless?

[vabtz]

I have been running a forum for over 2 years now. Its very successful but I have never been able to make more than a dollar a day off of it. Has anyone had any sucess converting forum users to paying customers either for your products or via advertising?

[rogerd]

Worthless? Not necessarily. Hard to monetize? Usually.

Forums tend to be high maintenance and resource intensive, while ad clickthroughs tend to be low. There are lots of reasons for this - "ad blindness" for regulars, lots of pageviews but fewer uniques, etc. It depends on what your objective is, though. You can bring a lot of visitors to your site via search engines, and if you have a "money" part of the site you can induce some of them to visit. And, depending on your topic, Adsense or other ads can be profitable.