I have a musical band fan forum, with a PR of 5. It has a few thousand members, and receives about 10,000 page views a day. Adsense isn't great because of the low paying keywords. Individual banner campaigns from smaller companies have done better, but nothing to write home about. The demographic is from 13-25, so most affiliate ads don't convert well. Does anyone have any ideas on how to generate more revenue?
You are one of the 10 million forum owners out there that are suffering to get some income from a forum. Forget about adsense, no one clicks on those banners on a forum, people are there to read the posts, and don't want to be taken away to some other site when they click on a banner. It seems that the only way is to send an email to your members and ask for a donation. I don't know of any advertising company that accepts forums, so you can't even use CPM. If you have enough loyal members maybe they can help out. Put up a donation button and hope for the best.
The CPM days of money making forums are over. I used to run a similar kind of forum way back in the day when CPM campaigns netting over 5 dollars CPM. Now you're lucky if you get 25 cents. CPC is the way to go. Forums are normally a lost cause. As a forum owner myself I want my members to post more new topics, not click out on an ad.
You can also sell a block of "Ad Space" to a coop member. If you have 1000's of members posting you probably have a lot of indexed pages which could be quite valuable. Might want to check with the TOS though as selling weight is against the rules but I'm not sure if that includes selling space or not (In other words you don't have a Coop account and just put a piece of PHP code up for someone else)
hello, I can help you place my network ads on your forum. We pay CPC at about 0.025 - 0.15 dollars per click. What is your forum's address and how are the stats (uniques, pageviews, adviews and clicks) ? THanks!