A bit stupid question for you pros but whats the best thing I can get for a sports forum of 8000 unique visitors per monts with slightly over 300 000 pageviews. Do I go for adsense or look for a company to place the banner?
I would place adsense on the forum until you can find advertisers. Contact as many companies as you can until all your ad slots are filled up.
8,000 uniques per month is very little especially for a forum :/. To make big bucks from a forum you'll need lots of traffic... at least 1,000 uniques daily... You said that your niche is sports right? For monetisization, I suggest that you go for adsense... but in the meantime, you should keep working on that traffic. Remember more traffic = More money. Keep it up
you better leave adsense until you have better traffic, they are more severe with small sites and in case you get your account suspended you wont be able to reactivate it.
adsense is a good idea. You may also consider chitika ads for us traffic (If you dont have a lot of us traffic dont bother). You can also place affiliate links (i am not sure if you will find affiliate sales for sports).
You won't find many banner advertisers for a sports forum. Adsense would be the better choice. Usually, Adsense revenue is more dependent on first-time visitors. These are the ones who are most likely to click ads. Try to get as much search engine traffic as you can. Visitors that log-in everyday are unlikely to click ads.
try to find some CPA offers at copeac.com or find some product at clickbank and put banners i think that's better than adsense
for this, you need to generate big traffic first. And yes in the mean time , i would also prefer adsense
Work on advertising free first to get the forum going then after you build a medium amount of traffic use adsense to explode it.