I just have a volunteer Mod. Oh and a web developer who helps maintain the site, upgrades etc. He charges by the hour.
Most of moderators in my forum are volunteers. We dont bother on what they have to do as a Mod, we just want them to keep our forum clean by spam. Most of time we going discussing.
You're a bit of a sucker if you're giving forum staff money. (Unless it's a forum for a paid product, and they're paid developers) Forum staff should be active members that *want* to moderate.
Well, I have just launched a new forum and I AM PAYING 3 MODERATORS on my forum. If its a new forum, then you SHOULD pay your staff. If you have an already established forum, then most likely you'd get volunteers.
A new/empty forum doesn't need moderators. You should easily be able to handle something that small on your own.
I currently have Moderators working as volunteers. But I have told them once I start making £10 per week, I will pay them 10% per week.
You shouldn't ever need to pay mods. You won't need mods for a brand new forum, you need people posting and spreading the word. On a big forum you usually have people who are "dedicated" to the forum and volunteer to be mods.
If you launching a forum for a already popular website you will need mods to stop the tsunami of spam and n00bs . I don't pay any of my mods but most of them do get free oil changes and brake maintenance , needless to say the 60% of my mods I know them IRL .
if ur forum is small u don't need mods to keep the spam in control.... once ur forum grows then u will get many volunteers to help u
Adsense wins in CPC every single time against CPM. Maybe thats cuz i have no broad forums, only super-niche ones
We don't pay our forum staff, they are totally highly honored volunteers. We have a huge forum over 400k posts. We don't dictate terms to mods, they are free to do anything. We want just the spam and foul language to be taken into control. Though I might insist there is nothing wrong to share revenue with the forum staff if they are really hardworking group of people like we have around.
I don't pay mods on my busiest forums but if I made enough $ on the forums I would consider it though. They are a huge help, I couldn't keep up my sites without them. I do send them a nice gift certificate once a year to thank them for their efforts. I've got a couple of new forums but have most of the anti spam work automated. It will probably take a year or 2 to build them up enough to need mods.