Forum as an automated income

Hi,

I was wondering whether you guys on here have experience of forums that you've either bought or created to a point such that you can pay someone to administer the site for you and just sit back and take a monthly income stream from the profits?

Is it actually profitable? Do the admins treat the site as you would?

I'm wondering because I want to turn one of my older sites into a brand new portal with blog, forum, articles etc, but I'd prefer to pay for all the content (either buy it initially, or pay for it as and when I want it or on a continual basis).

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Mike.

 

I have a very busy forum and there is no way that I could sit back and let someone else run it for me and reap the rewards. I do have several admins that treat the board as their own. I do not have to pay them, they are volunteers, but they do an excellent job for me. Hope this helps.

 

You run your own race

Its always better to run and administrate the forum on your own.
Surely, you should collect a team of people who will be interested in forum topic you are running on.

Then, there comes many factors.
Its all on how the next persons might be and so on, with exceptions indeed.

 

I would love to have a forum as an automated income... it's possible, just not practical.

 

And very hard to accomplish.
Forums generally are a lot more work to build and maintain then most people think.
+ In general forums don't earn that much.
If you want to sit back and relax, you better try to create a small site about a specific subject, do some SEO and put some ads on it.

 

I would never trust anyone to admin my forum. One day they get mad at you, erase all the posts and ban everyone....not very likely but I think you are the only one who can control things how you want.

 

totally agree with u, never know what may happen

 

I would be happy to pay people to look after it, but I'm just wondering whether there is a profit potential. It seems unlikely from what you guys have mentioned!

Mike.

 

Nope, no money to be made in forums. Big ones require quite a bit of unix server administration too. Start a business for the passion and money will follow.

 

That's all adminss dream, but too few can live off the forums. And to earn a decent revenue you work more than the 9-5 "normal" schedule

 

So then why do so many people try starting one to earn an income? Are the forums just secondary to entice people to the main content of the site?

 

what???

Im glad you are banned because that is wrong, you can make serious money from forums and you dont need unix server administration skills...

youll pick up how to use ssh and basic html and php skills as the years progress

 

Do not expect to make a lot of money through ads on forum..

 

Your ctr will be low but you can still make plenty of money with enough visitors and good ad placement...

 

So what is the primary way to monetize a forum? It would seem to me that the best way would be to attract advertisers within the niche and have banners etc. Is this a good approach?

 

Kind of.
Forums are specific area. It's a community.
Give them something they would like and appreciate and be given smth back.

Banners are... ordinary. Try to think of something more, such as subscriptions for forum addons, Partnership Programs, txt/html ads, etc. and integrate it into forums. Be creative.

Can' really agree with this statement.
Well, if you are creating forums on your own, as Your Forums, than it's really hard to make it happen, but...

...how about being paid for managing other people forums?

 

You do have to be creative to make money from forums - most CPM advertisers don't like them, because forums have a lot of pageviews per unique user compared to most sites. There is money to be made though, just it's harder.

Affiliate programs might work if you can find enough fresh offers to give to your users.

 

Hmm I find adsense a pretty good way to monetize. I'm running a forum with 5,900+ members, 100+ members a day, and 1,000+ uniques a day and it's averaging low $xx daily, so yeah.. adsense is pretty good I guess.

 

That's pretty nice. Congratulations on your success!

 

Adsense has been working pretty good for me, I dont know what all this bad noise is about forums not creating profit.