Are forums a good way to make money with adsense

I was wondering if forums bring a lot of revenue with adsense.
For those who have very active forums, what do you think?
Should someone trying to make money through adsense start a forum or should they try another type of website?
Let me know.

 

they are ok, ppl become blind to them aftera wwhile but depending on niche can be decent

 

Forums are not easy to start but if you could do it. Yeah they would make you some profit.

 

There are many forums being made everyday. Unless you are making a forum where you know you will get members over time then it is not worth it. For adsense it depends how you integrate it into the forum.

 

It depends what kinds of websites you are comparing forums with. Forums are usually better than directories for Adsense, but worse than blogs or topic-based websites with unique articles.

Ad blindness is one issue with forums, but the other one is that you don't know what people are going to post next. So if you do implement Adsense on a forum, make sure you use a good word filter. It's not just a case of banning obscene words, but also the ones that are likely to get you an automatic ban, such as solicitations to click fraud.

 

Also, it's highly unlikely you'll get a quick return on a forum. It takes a little while to build forums so you probably wouldn't get much back from AdSense (other than pennies) in the first, say, six months.

 

Thanks for the replies.
I wonder if there is someone here who makes big bucks with adsense on this forum and what amount of money in general is he making.

 

if you want to make money from forums, include a content site. Have features on all of your pages that allow people to "blog about this content".

If you can keep your users longer with a forum, and have them visit your main page for updates and such, you can convert very well.

 

General topics forum are not special for earning from Adsense, more specyfic, themed forums work better with that.

 

Yes, forums are a great start - I have had more luck with image ads than text ads but a good integration of both and decent placements may help

 

I don't have a forum, but check out this thread. people seem to be struggling a lot to get adsense money with forums.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=420383

also think about this, how many times did you click on an adsense ad here in dp? I haven't.

 

With forums its often hard to achieve good CTR. Thats probably the only downside.

 

They can be an excellent way to make money, but CTR (by all accounts) is fairly low for forums. So you neeed a lot of traffic.

 

Forums are generally much more difficult than conventional content sites. Here are some of the possible reasons:

- You don't control the content on your forum site, your users do. Therefore, you have little control over ad relevancy. Low ad relevancy results in low CTR.

- Forum visitors tend to be repeat visitors. Repeat visitors become ad-blind and don't click. Unless your forum generates lots of new members every day, you won't make much money with Adsense.

- Optimum ad placement is difficult with the forum page format. For example, large rectangle ads located in the middle of content is difficult to impossible with most forum pages.

- Forum visitors are usually participators, not searchers. The forum itself fills their need. They have little reason to click on ads or leave the forum site.

 

Some older users do click ads if they are interested, i.e if that topic directly relates to that thread... but it is rare

 

forums = good traffic = sustained traffic = not too many clicks

 

theres a lot of points about sustained traffic, the problem is cost. If you start doing something decent like 1,000,000+ impressions your going to start looking at dedicated hosting.

But their are advantages, if you have a community posting 500 posts a day, your going to grow by 50+ pages a day. Id like to see a blog beat that.

So, if you can rank well, and get enough back links, you should be fine. Then you should get a lot of traffic from google which is where the money is.

Dont focus on CPC either, focusing on CPM, and being paid for impressions is much more lucrative.

Though you need to be in the rich niche

Pierce

 

Forum users develop ad blindness overtime ... the best is to mix it up a little from time to time i guess

 

wow. found out a lot that i didn't know myself.
...makes sense...although, i don't click ads at all...well, only a countable times...
...but, it's true...unique hits are necessary for making money with adsense...
...on the other hand, ads could probably drive your regular users away...

 

i do think the smaller boxes, with 4 ad units arnt good on a forum.

My CPM ads get way more clicks, to which i can only assume is because they are one HUGE block that people see.

But the other ads still get a regular click through.

But yes CTR on a forum or any social networking site is poor, 550k impressions, 0.17% CTR