Do you own a forum? Is it successful? Was it a complete failure? If you do share it on this thread and mention something about your experience with it.
I used to own a debate forum. It wasn't too bad. I just didn't have time to moderate it. If you are really serious about starting a forum, make sure to have plenty of serious moderators that want ot do the job. Once your forum gets popular, make some money off of it. Then you can pay people to moderate.
Just started one up about two months ago. www.AnswerSpots.com Doing well i think been putting in a lot of hours though sometimes 20hr work days just takes time promoting it and updating it putting backlinks in. Hope to get some good seo traffic end of feb beg of march. Right know getting about 100 a day with a 20% bounce and 2000pv. Just stick with it takes lots of time.
I have owned a couple of forums in the past and my experience with them was not the best. Owning a forum takes a ton of time and a lot of patience if you want to see it become successful. You first have to build a large enough database in which users would actually like to join in discussion on your forum, and then you have to advertise it like crazy and hope it takes off. I would not suggest starting one as their is a ton of competition now'a'days but the final decision is up to you, look at DP - it makes like $20,000/Month
I ran a few forums, had good administrating experience especially with vb, I just didn't focus on the proper money making modes, even though I had good traffic I didn't make much revenue with them, I had to rely on other sources to fill this forum payment. I am actually freelancing to vBulletin forums at the moment so I don't think my experience has gone waste
dp makes more then 20k a month my friend they made that much when they had 10k members just on adsense alone.
I also ran some forums, vbulletin is the best script out there by far. I am working on a new forum that will launch soon.
Actually it's a laborious activity .. Maintaining a forul isn't too easy cause it takes too much time .. Nut the hard part is in the beginning to kick start it .. But later it will be easier especially if you have some good moderators to help you ..
I own a forum that is a few months old. I am making progress but it is very hard work making sure there are always new threads and discussions going on, and getting the word out about it. I am finally getting some steady members but have a long way to go!
I have a money making forum on my site: onguardia (dot) com. You can get a free money making ebook and the forum is for paid members. Russ
vb is nice but spendy phpbb3 is nicer to use until you get use to everything and build your forum up and its free. heard the new vb software has a ton of bugs.
I worked on a popular pet grooming forum 3 months ago. It was tough getting members at first because of the competition. I researched on the popular topics and made posts myself using over 30 accounts. Within a month, I made it look like the forum was active. I hired about 60 people to post around 3000 posts and start around 500 threads. Last month stats - Total Threads - 1254 Total Posts - 7,988 Earnings - $4 (Adsense), $300 (Clickbank sales) Forums suck for Adsense.
i had created a forum for my school mates. initially it was a run away success with school mates joining in and sharing nostalgic memories. but somehow soon that frittered away and its become more like a tourist booking forum.