Thanks for your opinion but everyone has one and they're all different. However, if you'd like to present your opinion with some value to this discussion then I'd suggest that you mention facts to support it. Otherwise we'll just fall on a endless loop or flame wars without really analyzing different perspectives on this matter.
well actually i have seen many new social networkings coming since i am connected to net(1yr and 2 mths). and i am sure that "warez forums" are going less in number as when i was connected first i was very use to find them but not now. i saw many new webmaster forums coming as well. some ptc related forum came in recent times. though forums are old but remember "old is gold".
Well, I have bought my first forum, but I finally found a problem with managing forums. You have to make them very active, or most members will move to the "bigger" forum. Seems to me all the small and middle sized die out, and leaves the big ones stronger (i.e Digitalpoint). I am sure many similar webmaster forums have died out to losing activity.
I much appreciate the replies!! I am considering creating my own forum for a specific niche. We'll see how it goes.
Maybe the answer is to find others that are willing to be the core members, offer them revenue sharing, if they act as moderators. They can keep the forum alive.
Well.. my mileage varies from yours when compared to what I have seen from the forums that I've come around visiting over the years. It isn't the size that dictates which forums live or die on the mid-long term. You can have a perfectly large and dominant forum popular in 2004 and see it completely abandoned a few years later such as http://9!1!1cdnet.com (remove !'s from URL). You can also have small forums that even without many visitors or activity will happily keep on running for decades. (http://reactos.org, sanbarrow.com and so forth). It all depends on your goals. If all you're trying to achieve is a large number of visitors, then you can fill your forum with thousands of posts from mailing lists and get traffic from google. Throwing another webmaster forum isn't surely going to cut it in the long term.
The only reason a forum can become dead is if the forum doesn't have anyways that others can benefit from it or if nobody is going to build back links to the forum. ( advertising ) If someone owns a forum, let's say like Digital Point Forums, may people can benefit by making money online and learning a lot, that's why there are so much members in this community. For popular general discussion forums, it's a community where members can make new friends or chat with old friends.
one should consider continuing this thread there : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1906679
I have always been a fan of the smaller forum communities and have lost interest when some of my favourites started growing large and I stopped recognising posters. I have only really been an active forum poster in the past few years so from my perspective I am more involved in forums these days. But I agree with other posters that facebook and twitter must be taking some of the market away from many popular forums.
Gonna point out a stat I found today proving 100% that forums are not only alive but growing and thriving. http://investors.internetbrands.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=494137 30% year over year visitor growth...and a 21% revenue growth. All this in a time when many industry are stagnant. If you have a forum that's failing it's because you're failing to monetize and market. Don't blame the forum genre because it's alive and well.
They don't really say but I don't believe they have been buying new forums lately. And there is still the income itself which grew 21% which leads me to believe visitor growth was probably natural. Facebook is just causing more people to use the internet to be social. Forums are a completely social website concept.
With all due respect but seeing one company presenting more money to investors doesn't really mean a thing unless you're looking for signs like nostradamus. In Europe, a lot of companies showed high margins of profit until 2007 when someone pulled the rug and we found a lot of dirt and colorful numbers. Even Island went bankrupt after repeatedly showing high-growth for nearly a decade - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/business/worldbusiness/10icebank.html?_r=1 At the INET announcement, there is no real detail from which sites the revenues are deriving. Although they keep forums on their portfolio, the first sites mentioned on the company introduction are (by order): http://www.apartmentratings.com/ http://www.carsdirect.com/ http://www.cruisereviews.com/ and none of these are forums. They are certainly professional as these topic themes are good $$ payers for each click on their ads, but why assume that forums are in the heart of this supposed revenue growth and not an increase of economical conditions for people to spend money in cars, houses or cruise rides and are just looking for information on the three sites mentioned previously? --------- If forums are not on their death bed, how would you describe what is happening with channel fuse? Can you really say it is alive and thriving? We're seeing a page being turned, forums won't die but we are being placed in the second page of user preferences.
Cool. Now present your reasoning to contribute with something of value or we'll just be reading "nooo", "yess", "nooooo", "yahh", "noooo" all day long.
What are you going on about? I mention the statement by IB about a 30% unique visitor growth too. CF is growing and has been. I'm no longer participating with CF personally since my own site grows 5-8% per month. I'm so damn busy with my own forums I have no time for additional project. However CF is still growing albeit slowly and grudgingly. But those problems are overall unrelated to the forum genre itself and more to do with management. I don't have exact data on the breakdown of IB's income. Anyone who wants to take the time to get a quarterly report or financial statement go right ahead. Personally I don't see any evidence that Social Networking sites are hurting forums. Even the poll shows that member opinion believes that forums are not dead. I'm just giving evidence to support that. If you can produce evidence to the contrary or at least valid arguments then go for it.
There's a lot of people who says that Facebook will provoke the death of many other websites like forums: it won't happen. Forums, luckily, are thematic, and you will never find interesting people on facebook or other social networks because of privacy restrictions, because many groups on Facebook are Fake.
Spam is definitely a problem facing these types of social networking sites. FB itself doesn't moderate the site well enough to tell you who to trust. You have to basically rely on real life friends to be part of your circle. I don't allow anyone not an IRL friend to be on my friends list. Forums have moderators and staff that help keep a site clean of generic spam accounts and there seems to be better communities because of it.
A lot of new forums are starting up but so are a tonof blogs. I think it's just a trend recently of people starting blogs and sites like that because they can easily be monetized, as compared to a forum.
Blogs and Forums are both going to be long-term genres on the interwebs. They are just 2 simple concepts that resonate with users and site creators. Social Networking sites will stick around too but probably evolve more so that blogs or forums. However FB has certainly taken more of a hold than Myspace did as it's faster to evolve. But I think someone is going to overtake them within 5-7 years.