Website offering free forums with Adsense

[endomorph1]

I am thinking of setting up a website that offers free Snitz forums (similar setup to Invision) where people can register and I will set them up a free forum.

The costs would be covered by having Adsense in their forums.

How do people like Invision cover the risk of click attacks or any kind of ad abuse?

If I had one member go mad or be subject to attack, I may loose the whole account and therefore income from all the other forums.

Do you think this is something worth writing to G about and asking what they would do?

[asp4bunnies]

I know of a site that does this exact thing with phpBB and didn't make much money. It apparently is fine though.

Forums ads are just typically ignored by members.

Also, as a general word of caution - Snitz really gets slow on very active boards.

[Atomic]

Perhaps the default Snitz setup but if you customize the code it can be blazing fast.

[NoLimits]

The only problem I would see with this, is that the content of forums varies WIDELY - and although it wouldn't be "your" forum, you would still be responsible for content moderation to meet the AdSense TOS.

[endomorph1]

True Atomic. I have seveal Snitz forums running on Access (instead of SQL) and they are very fast.

[daugava]

I can confirm that forum CTR is indeed - even if you
avoid obvious pitfalls, like having session IDs in the URLs.

The issue of moderation is important too. Unless you want to moderate posts manually, you should at least configure the forum to restrict posting of questionable topics, based on keywords.

[Heartlander]

You are treading dangerous ground, unless you are going to personally moderate the content.
Just today I removed the AS code from a few pages that people use as blogs, as the posts were getting a little dicey.
I hold a firm belief in giving a long leash in this regard, so to put a muzzle on anyone would be going against my principles and the foundation I've laid.
They speak their mind as always, which can at times be construed as "hateful", perhaps.
It's not like I'm going to send it off to G and ask "is this posting OK?"
Please.
The code gets pulled.

....and life is more important than a few dollars over the long haul.

[endomorph1]

But what I can't understand is Invision Free have over 780,000 boards. As a webmaster, there is no way on earth you can modorate all of them!

Yes, of course the forum would be designed with stop words to help cut down on possible breaking of TOS.

I know that this could be a good earner. I have 4 boards myself, and between then they make over $2000 a month.

Imagine what 100 boards could make!

[Heartlander]

2 grand a month with forum sites?
Must be some pretty busy communities, huh?

You should be giving us tips! LOL

So does Inv Free put their ads on all of their free boards?
That would be impossible to monitor, but if they are premium- what can anyone say?

Yeah, I know.
Everybody plays by the same rules.

[asp4bunnies]

True Atomic. I have seveal Snitz forums running on Access (instead of SQL) and they are very fast.

Not to nitpick, but Access is not designed for scalability. You can't have too many users on it at once, so Snitz can only use SQL to do what the endomorph wants.

SQL can still be fast - I just think you should look at different forum software for what you describe. ASPPlayground is very scalable and has a .NET version, but it's pretty expensive.

[Atomic]

I run a few dozen Snitz forums, all with SQL 2000 and they are quite fast even with, say, 100 concurrent users. I suppose it might slow down if that number reached 1,000 but a lot of forums would do that. Sure some old Snitz versions were slow and adding some of the MODs can slow it to a standstill but as as a MOD writer for Snitz for many years you learn how to clean up the poorly written MODs and not to use the resource hogs.

I have a few sites that are pretty decently sized portals based on Snitz with a good amount of activity and they are very fast. But you are right about Access. Once I had 30 people on the site at a time I had problems and once the database grew to about 70 megs it was time to either upsize the database or close the forum.

But this is all pretty off topic. [Sorry folks]

[endomorph1]

2 grand a month with forum sites?
Must be some pretty busy communities, huh?
You should be giving us tips! LOL

Heartlander, I would be more than happy to. It is a mixture of topic, ad positioning, and add colour. The sites are not that busy - The busiest one had 175461 page views in August.

It's not the members that do a lot of clicking, I get many visitors that come to the sites, never join, but do click.

Yes Invision free do put ads on all the free boards, but you can pay to have them removed.

I think with the amount of boards thay have running, they must be a premium publisher so anything goes.

780,000 x $0.05 = $39,000 - Possible half day takings for them?!

[yolkman]

780,000 forums hosted, but 750,000 forums are inactive. If you browse their directory, 99% are having 0-1 postigs.