anyone want to share/brainstorm ideas abt monetizing online forum communities? Some obvious ones would be: 1. VIP/Premium sections for paid users 2. Adsense or related programs 3. Donations? A couple of my forums (using vbulletin) bring in very small income (barely enough to cover server costs) .. are forums in general bad earners? or may be I havent monetized them properly?
Forums are great earners. Have you tried textlinkads.com or promoting someone's product via your forums? How large is your forum user base?
make advertising campaigns with people if you have enough user's. "if you sign up for this we'll give you..." like a sponsored competition or something.
This was written for a vBulletin forum, but it's true with all scripts. The Different Ways to Monetize Your Forum
will check those out! .. userbase is 100k+ for one site and for the other 15k+ .. (but now most members are inactive and the traffic is on the fall) Alexa rankings went down from 7k and 50k to 120k and 300k respectively gud idea .. thanks for the link!