Warning to Webmasters, it can happen to you

<strong>What happened to Soccerpulse?</strong>

That’s the question that is on the minds of thousands of web users who are wondering what exactly happened to the world’s biggest Football Forum dedicated to providing News, Chat, Media and scores and then everything .It happened only recently in October 2009, influenced slightly by the global financial crisis and the weakening of the keyword worth for soccer.

How could a website with just over 100,000 members just vanish like that? To be honest I was personally shocked and a little surprised at the news. Deep down my feeling was that with so much traffic and members, the website would always survive due to the strong roots.

Full article is available at:
http://www.whatisadsense.net/warning-to-webmasters-it-can-happen-to-you

If anyone likes the can reply with the full version...

 

That is a bad news. Loosing such a good forum is not so good for the internet community. I would say the web admin failed to maintain his forum. He should have tried to make it a money making forum.

So we lost it and a good lesson learnt. I have to rethink my thought of opening a forum

 

Hopefully people will read that and realize that Adsense is not a way to easily get wealthy.

 

AdSense is usually a terrible idea on forums, but that doesn't mean it's not absolutely superb for the right kind of sites. Most people just don't know how AdSense really works, and that's why they don't make money. I personally only use AdSense on optimized sites that get quality, relevant traffic from the search engines. That way I get clicks, the advertisers get interested people, and I avoid having my whole network priced. If you put AdSense on sites with mostly repeating visitors or the bs traffic that comes from social media, you'll get a very different result...

 

Definetely for forums its more difficult to earn good money, the focus has to be on the main site, unless you're really clever like digitalpoint.

Having a system that allows members to rotate their adsense was genuis.

 

I think the problem was with the niche and not that it was a forum.

Sports is usually a poorly performing niche.

 

I think you mean "its users makes tons of money" in fact DP donesn't charge any fees on the Market

 

Of course the niche is a problem here, but that's only another reason. Certainly a good one, though.

 

very bad news

 

It was bad to hear that gaints can fall....Quite discouraging for smaller sites isn't it?

 

I have that problem - I have a forum with 10,000+ members and 1.7-million posts and a ton of traffic, and recently moved over to 2-server set up because it kept crashing. It's expensive, and adsense income is very poor on that site. As Shawn wrote a while ago, I DON'T recommend starting a community to make money - it won't happen and the amount of work really required to run a forum isn't worth the return financially. If you're going to start a community, do it because you really enjoy talking to other people who share your interest. Too many people forget that $$ shouldn't be your main priority - you should do it because you enjoy it and are passionate about your topic.

Also - with the current advertising state, donations are critical to forums . What I've done is put in place an automatic subscription so at least they renew each year (although some fail because people right now are changing credit cards, banks, etc. due to the economy). People obviously get more benefits (more pm space, etc) for their account, and I also partnered with a local company who ship free gifts to each person who donates along with a coupon code to save them 15% off each purchase they make from them. I also run an ad for their company and remind people they save $$ on their purchase if they donate. So by donating they also get something back that's tangible. So each year they get a free gift, and by making it renew annually (although we disclose that - you'll get a ton of complaints if you don't tell them it will renew) you don't have to keep asking for donations and hopefully have a somewhat consistant income.

Don't get me wrong - it's still only half of what we need to cover the costs, but at least now they're covering about half of the costs of the server and I'm no longer getting killed. Hopefully more and more members will sign up to donate and it will be more self-sustaining. But to have a big forum survive in this economy you have to get creative and not just rely soley on Adsense. Or I agree - my site would probably be gone as well.

 

Well, I don't have a forum because I know from a long time that it takes much time to moderate, and even if you can recruit moderators, you have to watch them also, and a forum is resource hungry because they are all connected users, real time, you can't use caching pages for them as you can for visitors with no posting rights.
So it's a lot of web server resources, a lot of time, and the click rate is very very poor since they are mostly repeat users. CPM ads would work better, but I never liked CPM ads since they pay poorly compared to a well optimized PPC settings.
Anyway, it's mostly because of time involvment that I decided long ago to never add a serious forum to my sites. Visitors/users can already post comments on some of the content I or they produce on my site, so they can communicate there if they wish to, but no forum

 

I think just running adsense ads on forums is not a good idea. But i think they can get awesome CPMs from big advertising companies as they got so many members.

 

Terrible news, although the webmaster was set up for it himself. There are other ways to earn money online other than AdSense, and it seems as though it wasn't a good choice for his niche anyways.

 

i personally feel working/earning with adsense is not child's play and have to be cautious

 

for that kind of traffic could he not of advertised people like Sky TV who actually broadcast the games, and tie up with a betting firm???

 

It's not as easy as you think. I can tell you first hand that most companies are all about trading merchandise or services before paying $$. This is why as I mentioned above that sites with forums like ours really need to get creative and come up with your own solution, because companies are not throwing money at webmasters for advertising like they did years ago - especially after gambling sites (the ones who used to pay very well) were banned in the US.

 

I shocked by its Alexa details....

I don't understand why he has parked the site with GoDaddy. He could have easily sell it before the worst time!

 

really bad news

 

Wondering the same here
He could have at least sold out the forum to someone who would have maintained it, that could have fetched him some money too...wondering why he did not take that route