It's difficult enough building a community without paid posts & acquiring quality members. If visitors take the time to join a community & post, it's my opinion they shouldn't have ads stuffed in their faces. Especially in small to medium sized communities. Such communities can generate revenue by selling footer text links & so on. Ofcourse once the site is receiving a lot of traffic and is enormous, like DP for example, it wouldn't make much of a difference to the members. Do you agree or disagree with me?
My single and biggest rule dealing with forums is this: Place forums on the site AFTER it's receiving steady repeat visitors, and make a big deal about it. If you place forums down when the site launches, and you know your traffic won't be big overnight, you'll scare people away from the empty forums.
Yea, don't give your visitors the first impression that your forum is a ad forum. You should let them feel that you want them to discuss things not being advertised at.
You'll need one major traffic source then or some great SE positioning to build up a userbase. If you're down with a lot of bloggers, get them to announce your site to the world. When starting with an empty forum, your conversion rate for member signups will be extremely low - a lot of your visitors won't "stick" to your forum unless if there're people in there to respond. It's really a chicken or the egg issue. I'd only really recommend paid posting when you're getting good and steady traffic from the SEs. Incentivise your potential members - provide tools/articles/information on the site, but don't make it registration only! If you genuinely have good tools, they'll register by themselves.
I agree with Art. You'll most probably need to hire some people to post on you forum in the beginning and work on your SE positioning in the mean time. Good luck to you with that!
ive had forums go both ways. One of my forums died really really quickly, yet another one of mine did awesome, over 200 posts a day. I didn't do anything different, luck of the draw i guess.
There is nothing bad in displaying ads.But you should display ads in good manners.Don't be crazy to get clicks... Be wise and optimize ads.
I agree with many of you. Many established forums do not make much anyway. A brand new forum with lots of ads will make a really insignificant amount... so best to leave ads out for the time being..
i put ads on all my forums and got a few members that didnt care about them , but some of the more web savvy visitors seems to complain especially those that knew of competing forums... if you have a nchie forum without competition all over..then it doesnt matter too much from my experience, its when they can compare
Well, dcristo, I have such a forum. The homepage is a forum, but there is another part of the site A gallery that contains videos & images related to the topics which the forum discusses. I guess that's what's kept it alive. It receives more visitor entries than the forum, even though I repeat the forum is the homepage.
It is difficult to balance a free forum with/without ads. Sophisticate users abhor too much ads. But they are the one who run the forum. It need to be very intelligently picked up ads. And shoud not be in your face ads positioning. After all forums are not for Ads. Nuttymarketer
forums usually do best when you have an established and popular website and than you open forums and a big group of people (who you know personally) all join when it first opens and discuss matters in the forums activley. this than attracts fans of your site to join when they see "oh, a lot of people joined the forums on the first day and are activley talking, i think i will join too!"
i shut a forum only site down back in january and i had 37000+ members who used to post like mad and about 400+ people online all the time and i wasent prepared to get a dual xeon for that forum coz it wasent making enough money so if you say forum only is a recipie of faliour then i wont agree (the forum i closed down was about porn crap) I have two forum sites now nothing but forums and both of them are above break even and its only been 5 months
Frankly, what the big deal about ads being placed in forums. Forum visitors and users should understand that forum owner has to earn some money to cover overheads so that everyone can get value from the forum.
To put things in perspective, I have one forum getting around 2 million pages per month, and it's only earning around twice what one well optimized MFA/content site makes. In some instances, certain large forums will actually COST you money to uphold, but if you like them, think of it as doing them a service and creating a good community. I have another larger one, but the traffic is so mainstream it gets silly. Don't worry about ads being placed in forums, the only time I've seen people complain about ads is when you put them after the first post in a thread, and you're using a massive leaderboard. That really gets on your nerves. Also, the more mainstream the traffic on your forum, the more adconversions (clickthroughs, in this case) you'll get. A great trick is to place a square adbox into a singular segment blended into a quick reply box, that way if they read the thread to the end, but don't really want to reply, they'll often exit through the adunit