Should All Forums Charge?

Dream.In.Code recently shut down and I heard that it was about hosting costs. Before that we lost New Boston from the web. Looking at hosting prices I can see how this could end up being a common fate for scaling businesses. Everyone should double check the math here, as I’ve always been bad at it, however I think it’s pretty straight forward.

I’m looking at the cheapest hosting company I’ve seen, which is Firebase by Google. A 2.3 to 4kb message seems to be the common data rate for a 30 field entry into a database row.

300,000 fans posting 20 8kb messages = 50gb that day = 1,488gb of storage for that month = $260.

This is already too much for a small startup, even some bigger startups running on little economic fuel. It’s worse if that’s not a monthly charge, but rather a monthly charge for the storage.

If 300,000 users load 60 pages = $5,130 based on data transfer.

Let’s just say almost every forum and website is doomed. But this seems to be the reality.

I want to encourage forum owners to consider an open conversation with other business heads about charging $1 for their membership. If every forum did this as a norm, forums become big business, and no one fails.

The honest thing is, without subscription fee, most people are cooked. Because any forum on a larger niche, like video games, could get multi-million users. And it’s worse for people like me, who have a regular job. I’m limiting my game project to 10,000-20,000 users because of this.

Infinite scaling without fee = death.

Sites like New Boston and Dream.In.Code could come back if it were possible in their own business schema.

 

You didn't mention premium memberships (added benefits similar to DP's), featured posts, banner/text advertising (from users), are these things useless? I'd go that route before I'd start charging for joining the forum.

 

No forum can start charging members as a startup. Forum members need to see the value first before they even consider to pay. As the forums get popular and start having good traffic, there are wide range of monetization methods forums can utilize to compensate for the hosting cost. Some busy forums are full time businesses for the owners generating good five figure revenue a month. Few hundred dollar hosting cost is nothing for these forums.

 

Forums have been a dying industry for a long time now. That's like saying Facebook should charge $1 per user. You know why they'll never charge a dime? They get more traffic by not charging and then sell advertising for access to it's users.

 

There are multiple ways that a forum can monetize itself. A forum can offer the main access to the site for free, then offer sub-sections to members for a fee. Charging for advertising is an option and even having Google Adsense on the forum is an option. Not to mention affiliate marketing. With all of that traffic coming to a forum, there has to be a way to monetize it and offset the hosting costs.

 

Time is changing, forums were a thing in last 5-10-15 years, glory years for forums, but now you have many other types of entertaining or to waste time, especially social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok etc. places where you can become popular and even make money pretty easy, it is not worth anymore for both sides, administrators/staff and users/contributors