Article brought to you by Internet4Cash.com Also check our "Get Paid to Post Program". 1. Popup ads:- There are quite a few advertising networks which will generate comparatively better revenues for you. However, that would really annoy most of your members. In a survey held last month, 93% of forum users said that they have left the forums which have started displaying popup ads. So is not it better to earn just a little less but maintain that strong userbase? instead of loosing on the forum members and make a little more money for a month or two! 2. Infolinks & Inline Ads:- As another way of revenue generation, a lot of forum admins have implimented "inline text" advertisements on their forum. Infolinks is the best example of it. What happens is, almost every forum member tends to just move their mouse around in the window while reading a long post. At that time, a lot of infolink advertisements pop-up, when the user did not even want to read it. Which distracts the hell out of them. Ultimately, lower down the standard of the content you've got there. 3. Displaying more then 1 banner ads on header:- Recently I've come across a couple of forums which had like 4 "skyscrapper" banners displayed in the header part, which pushed the forums down a lot. I had to scroll down on every page to see the actual content which is a real bad practice. TheCashchat is just an example. 4. "Subscribe to us" Popup:- Blogs were the best ways to get "subscribers" to read your blog daily. Lately, a lot of forum admins have been advertising "subscribe to us" boxes to get stable userbase. It is really a good idea and benefits both the parties i.e. Members and forum admins. However, I have noticed quite a few forums which have chosen to have a window popped up asking to "subscribe to us" on EVERY PAGE that is loaded. I would say this would have made more then 90% of the guests to run away from the forum. So whats the point in getting 5% of the guest converted as subscribers when the potential massive chunk of 95% of the guests have decided to not to visit anymore! Hope this helped you a bit and thanks for reading
It did help alot actually. I dont have any of those implemented in my forum, but looking at your bad example forum, and wow it is bad, I cant believe they have over 2k of members.
Mark my words that those members are not interested at all in the forum. Even though they've got good stats, thats one of those forums where no post makes sense. You ask something and others say something alienated lol.
Ya CPA , PPC , private forums , affiliates & forum store are far far better ways to monetize on a forum . The moment you stop caring about your community and start thinking about cash only its game over .
one of best ways is to nurture the community and build a strong community who will spend on anything you suggest...then go for monetize
Community forums will give best results if the community have strong need to visit and also show advertisements only after each thread, not in between which will create problem for the user to browse
The example of the forum overusing header ads is absolutely ridiculous, how they have a community at all totally baffles me.
It looks tacky to have 4 banners on the home page. So I agree with the op. by having a lot of banners, it looks like you are desperate for something, or it tells me that you are just in this for the money, and thats about it, but then again, there are not many people that setup a forum, unless it is for money, but little do they know that it is very hard to get a forum off the ground, and when the results do not show, they are gone.
People also won't be as inclined to trust a forum spackled top to bottom with obnoxious ads. I've seen forums and other websites with so many large, popping, expanding, noisy, flashing ads I'm lucky I didn't get a seizure; such sites look not only desperate but spammy and people don't trust spam. One banner under your logo should be all you need.