I use my forum to promote my other site, that is the one that earns me the money. This can be a good technique
I have a forum, which as 30,616 posts, 1395 members. It was created on 3rd Febuary 2006. Subject Pokemon. What would you guys say this would earn?
It depends a lot on how active your forums are. A better gauge would be number of uniques a day. And then it would depend on your site design and ad placement
I have a forum with around 5-6000 daily uniques (37,000 members). If it wasn't for the subscription thing, it wouldn't make any money hardly. I have another site with 21000 members and it makes no money at all (well$1.00/day
Don't expect to get rich from a forum using AdSense. Ads can be placed just between the posts, or in the header/footer. Therefore, the ads will be totally outside the area of interest.
That sounds like a GREAT strategy. A few questions: What forum software are you using? How did you promote the forum and how long did it take to pick up steam?
It would definitely have to be a large forum in order to earn some good money. CTR can be lower than 0.05%.
I have about 2000 members and 10,000 topics with 500-600 uniques / day and am making $2-4 average / day. I do believe this is absolutely shocking for a forum of this size! Could someone take a quick peek at it? Is it a particularly low paying niche? In the end, i'm not really bothered though because I believe that a site should be about something that interests you & that you have a passion in - only then will you actually be able to see the point in keeping the hard work up! Imagine if all your hard work was to go away tomorrow - i'm sure you'd be upset - so don't give up just because it isn't paying well!
I earn less per day with AdSense on my forum that is 4-5x more visited than yours. As said, the money comes from direct advertising.
adsense on my forum is pretty crappy..to the point of why even have it there. the CTR is low (as most visitors are returning and thus develop ad-blindness). a bit off topic but you guys sound knowledgeable...if you had a company interested...would you rather take a flat advertising fee or take a % of the sales? just as an example..$50/month or 10% of any sales from the site.
I am using a phpbb. I didn't do any promotion, just wrote many articels (tutorials) and put them on wikipedia. Seems they were good enough so nobody deleted them. Then you just have to wait. Although you won't get any backlinks from wikipedia anymore because they activated the "nofollow" attribute you will get many visitors. Try 234x60 Ads directly under the first, second and last post (before the signature!) so it looks like somebody posted a link. I made good experience with that. Do you show the ads to all visitors including your registered members?
I run a few forums, I would say based on what I do I make around $1000 a month from a 30k members forum, But I make double that in donations / subscriptions & affiliate links.
I'd be careful with that second ad, the one that looks like a forum. I've heard plenty of stories of Google banning users for that implementation. Otherwise, I would move one of your blocks within the thread to the bottom - after all, that's where users go to post. And I've already mentioned, but I think your forum would work well with Auction Ads or similar.
DoA - I have a website in your niche with over 7000 users and I make about as much as you do, If using Adsense, I swiched to promoting affiliates its alot more profitable.
CTR is low because as some have said you basically have the same people coming back over and over and they arent likely to click ads. You can still make plenty of money though. Think about all the user generated content being slurped up by search engines! yumm.