Do forums fail?

well I would like to bring a different prospective to the story.

Are you looking at running a forum as a hobby or for money earning ?

If the answer is the first one, you can always hold on to it, try to gather members of same interest keep in touch with them and build a community. Your focus should be on building a community and not trying to get into profits. You should always have a backup to cover up for your forum's earnings. Based on your forum's content, marketing forum could take may be an year or 2 just to cover up the hosting costs. If u r running this as a hobby, this will not worry u much. You could always ask your members to donate (on their will and not forcibly) for covering up hosting costs. If you could get into covering up ur hosting costs pretty soon you can start generating profitable revenue, keep in mind don't be too greedy you could lose your reputation at your own forum which would practically kill your forum.

But if u are planning to run a forum for making money, either you have to be at top of your marketing and social networking skills or hire a team to do that. Forums are never a one-man show, its a team work unlike a blog.

 

Forum as a concept has not failed. You do need to think over the reasons of why you want to start a forum otherwise it fails even before you start.

Then the rest comes naturally. I only started a forum on my own because my tools were competing with the tools from the forum owner and I was invited to go away. Started my own forum to discuss my tools and more people also followed because it was something interesting to follow and we had a lot of fun.

It was never about the money and good things appeared like a sponsor for a dedicated machine, plenty of progress in our development field and the sort. If you are not driven to use a forum for building a community, then the concept of forum fails.

 

You need money and time. If your so passionate about it, you would never quit. I am starting one up as i speak. You need to have something to offer the community. I'm employing moderators @ $15 a week, with a big game plan in tact and will be looking soon to outsource the seo for my site, while me and the mods focus on the content in order to give people something unique to read up on. Yes it is a long process, but with a dedicated team, layout and obviously money, it wall all fall into place if you go about it the right way. Money is the answer.

 

I would say on this question it is a little bit of both. It is hard to keep a forum active and a lot of work. I ran one and ran out of time for it, now its in the forum graveyard

 

nice idea, moderation is a problem for some boards, but in others its finding the right traffic. The right traffic so you don't end up with tons of spam instead of quality posts that people want to read and respond too. It's not easy. There are many forums and some are over-moderated, some are under-moderated and over-moderated doesn't mean too many moderators, but just to harsh of moderators. It's got to be a balance.

 

Totally agree, all within reason.

 

I give anyone who can get a good forum going that is popular, highly rated, active and not spammy credit. I really don't think one person can do it all by themselves. A team of people and people who are not good friends too. Forums with many friends from before the forum (if you understand that) creates problems in authority and delegation of it.

 

can you guys give examples of the biggest forums that failed

 

It is tough running a forum, the main problem is SPAM - lots of it of very different forms some of which is caught by spam blockers.

But people posting useless / non-relevant posts just to get their links back to their website in their signature is one big huge problem at the moment.