In my site (http://www.compactech.com/forum/), there are several at the header and a big one at the bottom. There are around 200 unique users / day and around 15,000 page impressions / month and I don't earn much. Thanks.
and you wont earn much in the future, too. sorry to say that but forums suck for adsense. i had one once and it was depressing. if you are really interested in making money then build up a blog or a normal site. but it could help if you bring the ads into the posts or below them. try build in a 234x60 ad directly into the first post. or use 728x90 ads under the first post.
It gives: "Bad Gateway The following error occurred: The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL." Code (DNS_HOST_NOT_FOUND):
Check carefully on the URL, its the same one I wanted to show you. stankoff's one has a spacing. Try this again https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954 I do have a forum as well but the CTR honestly sucks, as compared to two other blogs I have. The linkad on the top blends well in your forum
First, a very nice forum. However, I see a number of problems with using Adsense: 1. Your forum covers a very wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to Earth climate to business and finance. Since the range of topics is so broad, Google won't have an easy time figuring out what ads to display. Ad relevancy will not cover all the topics. For example, when I veiwed the site the ads related to "robots." If most of your visitors come to your site because of their interest in robots, there's a good chance they'll be interested in clicking on one or more of the ads. If they came because of their interest in Earth and climate, not much chance of a click. 2. Forums usually don't do well with Adsense. One of the reasons is that forum visitors tend to be repeat visitors, and repeat visitors tend to become blind to any ads on your site. Another problem with forums is that it is often difficult to place ads in optimum formats and locations on forum pages. Placing horrizontal banner ads after the first post is about as good as it gets, although not optimal. 3. You are using a link unit instead of ad units. Link units typically don't do well (in my experience) because they are small and hard to see, require the user to click twice, and you can only have one of them. Ad units are much better since they offer large, attention-getting formats, require only one click, and you can have as many as three of them. I wish I had a magic answer for you, but with a forum, you'll have to work hard to do well with Adsense. It's not impossible, just difficult. As for how to monitize a forum, I suggest you check out http://www.johnchow.com. It's about monitizing blogs, but most of his techniques apply to any type of site. Good luck.
It's such a great answer! Thank you so much! So, currently, I made several modifications - 1) no footer ad, 2) there is a one big image header ad, and 3) when someone navigates to a thread, on the first post appears several google text-based ads - and indeed, now the ads google publish are very relevant! I think that the footer ad is a little bit annoying because it's too big. Why after the first reply and not before?
the 728 x 90 ad in the first post is maybe to big but keep it that way and wait how your users will react. its more important that you adjust the colors. use the same background color as on your site (#F6F8F6). no border (means same color as background) color all links in posts blue (#0000FF) and use the same color for the adsense title. black is not a good color for links, most people are used to the standard blue. use black fpr adsense text and url. by the way, it seems that you have a big problem with spambots: http://www.compactech.com/forum/index.php?showforum=189
I'll keep the 728 x 90 for a week or two and see what happens. Thanks for the color advice - how did you know what exactly the hex of the colors? Did you look at the source code? About the spambots, yes, I know... I opened a thread about that, see: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=427995
i use firefox with colorzilla, very useful for adsense. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271 most important thing is to make the ads look like content of your site. the best way to do this is to adjust the colors.