Hi fellow dpers, How many of you here own sucessful forum as business? Care to share? The url and the type of forum? The monthly revenue and the revenue source?
I don't have a forum but if you are looking for advise I think I might be able to help. Starting a forum is one of the most complicated web activities you will ever come across. The reasons for this are quite simple, the market is overcrowded and many people don't like to use forums. If you want your forum to take off you will need to spend a lot of money on advertising.
Yes a forum could be a business just like a normal site can be one. If you take a look at sitepoint.com I would regard them as being a business. I might have misunderstood your original question. Didn't you want to know if a forum could be a business?
Forums are known to be the toughest websites to monetize as adsense and other CPC programs do horribly with it. It's possible to be a success, but extremely difficult.
I also have a question, maybe some of you can help me with this if it is ok to start a forum in a field you are not familiar? e.g. I am a programmer, maybe I can start a forum for education and etc? in fact, I do not think that is a good idea, but it is really too crowd in the fields I knew better, very sad
My forum is very inactive except for a few ppl that post. But since the content is unique and ppl visit the forum a lot I get around 3/4$ a day from my publisher account from my forums.
Forum was best option back in 2004-05 when there were lesser content on google .... nowadays due to availability of free scripts everyone is jumping to make one forum each lol
I seriously doubt you'd make money even if it takes off. Sites like offtopic and something awful barely make enough to cover server costs.
I have been running forums for a while, I screwed up in the begining, but now I have a fairly successful one in my eyes.. At all hours of the day I have about 200-250 people on at a time posting and reading. I make enough to cover my server costs (which arent that much) and much more, it all comes from ppc and selling links and banners. It puts some nice money in my pockets, but I couldnt live off it, especially since around my house gas is $4.00 a gallon.... Edit: the 200-250 are members at a time, I have a bunch of lurkers as well but it fluctuates.
Forums can potentially be a big money business, you can bank in big time by establishing it and then selling it to a larger company. That's what a lot of successful forum owners have done, build it up and sell it. Sherdog.net did this for an example, along with many other forums. Reason being a lot of forums that cover topics such as sports, gaming, etc covers the key demographic and are amazing as far as return visits. Don't be discouraged, pick a hot topic, build a good website for it, then launch the forums. A lot of people overlook the actual site, I think it's crucial to create a good website to support the forums.
The quickest way to have a forum fail is to try to replicate successful forums with a large userbase. That's pretty much the only advice I can offer you, you have to be creative and unique -- getting active members who will post and create content for you is the hardest part, anyone can setup a forum in about 10 minutes, so it's important to have something that sets you apart and draws people back. All the forums that I've had have been forums to supplement a content site, so the revenue of the forum alone is horrible, but the combination of the two works out nicely. CTR's are horrible on forums, hence the low revenues.