The purse forum -- been around FOREVER but I cant see how they make any money with 1 or 2 small banner ads? Whats the point? maybe I am missing something?
even a HUGE women's website like mothering.com if they filled up all their ad slots would only be good for $20k a month. Why bother with all that work? Seems like should be closer to 100k a month.
If someone asked me if a purse/handbag forum would be a success, I would have told them no way until seeing this forum. They have 200,000 members. Wow! All they talk is about designer handbags and purses. If owning a closet full of handbags is what makes someone happy, then they really need therapy. You also missed one major source of their income - their blog: purseblog.com They review and sell handbags on that blog that gets 300K visitors a month. They get commission from each sale. The forum is there just to keep those women coming back. That's some big money there.
The owner(s) found a niche site and it's working for them. They must have observed women in department stores getting drawn to the purse ssection as if by gravitational pull. Now I can tell you from experience that really happens!
wow, these women must have closets full of handbags.. I wonder if the owner is also a handbag dealer, a lot of forums make money directing traffic to their biz. Screw the 25cent clicks you got a bunch of shopoholics turn over some product.
Next you'll be saying that you can't see how Amazon.com makes any money. Are you serious? This is a branded community... one of the most lucrative revenue models of all for those who really 'get' marketing. You're obviously a seller who thinks marketing is just a nicer way to say "selling". You sure don't understand marketing from these comments. John
There is more than one way to make money online. If you have too many ads, your visitors might be distracted and won't come back as much, especially if the ads get in the way. They can make affiliate sales and things like that as mentioned earlier by their blog site. Once you find a niche and establish yourself, the ads no longer stay as the main revenue generator.
There is an old trick to increase page rank and Alexa ranking. It is simply having a sub directory on your site. So yourdomain dot com/trends with a news feed pointing to that site will increase the popularity of the main domain as it continually refreshes with new content that keeps the search engine bots interested across the whole domain. It is the same for forums. If it is well trafficked then you will find the benefits flow to the main url. This site is not about making money, it is about link building alexa rank and page rank.
Hahaha. True. But sometimes husbands spend more than their wives so we cannot blame it always on the wives.
If their advertisers are making a lot of money there, they'll be willing to pay a lot too. I'm all for testing and trying to generate more money, but if they feel like they've optimized and are getting the most they can, then they are probably doing pretty good, even though they don't have a ton of ads.
Besides the husbands things are bigger ticket items so they are happy when their wifes buy it makes them feel better about what they spend.
they actually do not have 200,000 members. Funny enough. They actually have much less since they have banned who knows how many people/ Take into consideration that a lot of the members aren't actually active or that the banned members come back to a new name, OR trolls frequent that board and you can account for much of the numbers above./ They make money by various links thru their give aways for handbags. Also they use words that are recognizable and the user only has to spell out a few before their handy pc takes over. Not sure that they are raking in the dough but it is known that they are shady.
mrdeflation, she isn't making hardly any money. Maybe she wants it that way because she doesn't want to flood the board with ads??? Many, many webmasters keep ads to a bare minimum, and focus on the community.
even guys can be shopaholics. but its only the moniority. those girls doesn't know how to monetize their blogs. i mean if you want to make money through publishing on the net other than promoting their items, advertising/monetizing in their blogs is the only way for them to a little bit more money than usual.