No really, with 37k members and 400 concurrent users online, the forum would certainly be paying for itself.
I have a site wich is based mostly on forums, I´m doing 160USD per day with adsense. We have 120.000+ users, 1700 concurrent users on peak hours... www .psicofxp.com
I'm curious how much money do the hosting forums make? They offer great free hosting packages that would cost a lot otherwise.
Some great advice there thanks art. I have alway thought about starting a forum but after reading this thread I am having second thoughts. I don't get much traffic to my sites so I will need to up the traffic heaps.
we started a forum and added adsense and it seemed to work out great for us. the key is to not overload the site with the ads at first, and to place them correctly. We have never had a member complain about the ads as they understand they help pay to run the site. we have over 10,000 members and make some decent moeny from adsense each month. we run our site off a dedicated server as well as our other sites.
never place ads in the header or below the footer...lowest CTR in the universe...the larget the ad unit the better
I think that most forum users EXPECT ads - but not to be spammed with them, and especially in a forum infancy. Personally I like the idea of building ads into a community, and by that I mean that I progress the advertising on a forum. Like said a forum which just one ad unit then extend it to a feel text link sales at the bottom then maybe a footer unit once things are fully kicking a couple of months late before integrating a link unit a few months after that. Next thing you will know you have used all your ad units and still aren't receiving the world of complaints. People don't mind change as long as it is a slow change, and people know that forums need to pay for themselves like any other site, so as long as you try not to harm the community doing it they will be alright with a few ads here and there. I also think what is MUCH more important is actually looking after what really matters on a forum... members! So minimise the number of ads shown to members, keep it to one or two ad units, because at the end of the day if they are happy and posting they are only helping build your forums. Now guests are a whole different can of worms - I personally think you can actually use the old advertising spam technique to improve the number of registrations (which is what you really want) but having all your advertising up and making it know to guests that "Ads are removed when you sign up for FREE membership" and if they don't sign up well there is no harm in them clicking the ads that are "in their face" and if they want to remove them all they have to do is register which in the long run is better for you (it's better to have a member that comes back a few times a week and might click an ad once a month or something and contributes loads of content to your site than one who comes once and clicks one ad and never returns). That said this advertising spamming to improve registrations technique is probably best applied when your site is well ranked in search engines so that you get the constant flow of traffic regardless of the ads.
I don't mind ads, and for the most part, I tune them out. DP's ads are tasteful and discreet, and I notice that in a good way. There's another webmaster forum that rhymes with lightjoint that does forcefeed their ads, and it's really started to bother me. You have to move around the screen and avoid them to just read posts. It's vulgar. But they're the exception, most forums I visit do what they have to do, and it's not a big deal.
I suggest adding ads after getting steady traffic. Most love clean forums without ads, place them after a while. I wouldl ike to hear opinions from others.
What if you have a forum where people know there will be ads? Will it make a profit? See, I just came from a paid-to-post forum that went under because they didn't pay their members. And for some reason, the owner wouldn't use adsense. So I'm strongly looking into making my own forum and people that go there will expect to find the ads and know to click on them because that's how they'll get paid, not asking them to click, it's just an understood with that type of site. How do you think that would turn out?