Has ANYONE done OK with a forum?

or is it a total waste of time/money/effort?

[Tearabite]

From what i've read, forums just aren't good Adsense earners - which makes sense because returning visitors catch banner-blindness, but i'm wondering if anyone has made a forum worth the time?

I'm considering buying a domain and forum that is dedicated to a particular "high end" brand of Widget - This brand of 'widget' has a reputation for quality, style, and COST.. so the visitors to the forum have $$.

The forum has about 9000 members, of which about 1000 actively make posts.
The forum currently gets about 1000 hits a day, and about 50-100 posts..
BUT
the forum is currently closed to non-members including BOTS and spiders - i am certain that opening the forum to guests and getting it into Google will increase the traffic..

So, is all the time, effort and cost worth it? Has anyone EVER made a good run with a forum? I dont want to get rich - i just dont want to blow a bunch of time and $$ for naught..

[trillianjedi]

Yes, I'm very happy with the AdSense performance on my forums.

i am certain that opening the forum to guests and getting it into Google will increase the traffic..

Hell yes.

From what i've read, forums just aren't good Adsense earners

You only tend to hear complaining about it - which means generally you only hear the bad side. There are many people earning a living with AdSense on a forum (I know several).

banner-blindness

Relatively easy to overcome in my experience. Variety is the spice of life ;-)

TJ

[anand84]

If you have great traffic, probably try intellitext..incase you are not satisified with Adsense..

[Rodney]

i'm wondering if anyone has made a forum worth the time?

Yes :)

So, is all the time, effort and cost worth it?

Running a forum takes more time than running a one way content website, so whether it is "worth it" would depend on a few factors (how interesting you are in the topic, how much you feel your time spent it is worth, etc)

Has anyone EVER made a good run with a forum?

Yes

[creativepart]

I've got a big phpbb forum. It's currently averaging 55,000 impressions a day from 11,000 members. I'd guess less than 400 are active at any one time. I put adsense on over a year ago and the adsense earnings just keep going up. I haven't made a $1000 a month yet, but I'm 60% of the way to that goal.

So you tell me is $7000 a year "worth it?"

PS. As I saw what could be made from Adsense I've spent the better part of the month tweaking for search engines and this is bringing lots of new users into the page. New vistors are up from 12% of my visits to 22% of my visits.

[Tearabite]

Thanks guys..

Doesn't matter now, as the current owner of the forum turned-down my lowball offer.. :-(

[hal12b]

I have 2 forum web sites with very low click through rates. You also need to be aware that you can not control what users post unless you want to moderate every post, so it can be a lot of work.

I think the psychology with forum web sites is that visitors go there to read info. They may be less tempted to click on an ad and leave the site.

[Mr_Fern]

I run a community site. I opened it last March. It's basically profiles, which public/private messages, picture ratings, and forums.

Over the past 12 months, about 180,000 accounts have been opened. Obviously some of those accounts are just individuals who make more than one account.

As for doing OK, I'd say yes. I've generated over $50,000 in adsense revenue over the past 12 months.

The only thing I'd have to say is that my CPM really is the weakest thing on the planet. However, my site is more of a final destination, not a place where people are looking to discuss products, good or bad, whether or not to buy. If people are talking about the benefit they've gotten from widget A, and there are ads for widget A, other people who haven't bought the product but were thinking about it, might be enticed to click the ad after reading the testimonial.

Every site's different. It could work, it could fail. Just like most things in life.

[martinibuster]

>>>which makes sense because returning visitors catch banner-blindness

I keep my eye on forum titles to make sure they are descriptive instead of "Help!" as well as other tweaks to make the forum search friendly. The result? A strong search presence that draws new eyeballs all day long. No banner blindness.

The way I started the forum was to create a website with articles, draw the links into the site, then added the forum a year later once the site was on it's feet. People with questions are fed to the forum automatically.

[OptiRex]

but i'm wondering if anyone has made a forum worth the time?

Niche widget forums do much better than the multi-million page forums but then again you get far fewer visitors consequently overall clicks.

Mine make enough to warrant running them and the CTRs and eCPMs look impressive.