Ok so I just bought a domain TookTheLead.com It's going to be a gaming site and I wan't it mainly for discussions and forums etc. I'm thinking of putting a Leader or Small Banner like DP at the top then like an automated poster that post after someone makes a thread with the Username Sponsor. What is the productivity for an active forum with adsense?
Forums needs lot of traffic to be productive. I mean LOT OF TRAFFIC. The CTR can be low as 0,5%. Forums like DP might be an exeption, but even this needs lot of traffic to make the $10.000/month (what I have been told). Millions of pageloads. I have a forum with thousands of pageloads/day and the income I make with it are quite near of the breakeven. Good luck with your forum, but don't expect too much of it.
my forum don't even get me my Hosting costs. But i like to own some forums. If you are having a good forum which is indexed and the relevancy of perfect then you can expect some clicks. Better to advertise other banners on a montly basis on forums or put banners of your other adsense sites to divert traffic.
In my experience forums convert insanely well. My largest one has over 110,000 members and we do about 50,000 impressions/day unless we get a high load link from somewhere. 50k impressions is worth about $150/day if you get creative with your ad placement ala DP. Having said that I have seen my fair share of forums fall completely flat. The big forum I mention took 3 years to reach critial mass and really start earning. Outright selling ad spots on my forums also work well. But yeah like Jude says - if you can get the traffic the content sensitive ad programs work very well on forums.
My rugby forum does about 3,000 visits a day with average page views of 20+ per visit. Maybe I should look at placing adsence on there LOL.
Yaaaa...Some days my ePCM closes at $5.00+. Nobody can really confirm this but there seems to be a break point where you get a bigger share of the pie. The best tricks I use for forums are: 1. Top fold obviously (leaderboard) 2. Image under ads in top fold (leaderboard) 3. Random ad in postbit 4. Do not forget the archive! 5. Testing colors, and everything else again and again. My top fold pulls in 80% of the revenue.