forum sponsorship : how was this done ?

i plan on creating a forum and i came across this forum http://www.dnforum.com/forum.php if you visit the page you would notice that there are sponsors button located above some categories (the right hand side of the category) , I never knew this was possible , i guess its another way of monetizing a forum , now i would like to know how this was done , did they contact the sponsors or did the sponsors reach out to them ? is there any forum webmaster out there who uses this method of monetization also ? please explain .

 

many forum owners use this.
they are using vb. you can edit the vb templates to do the same.

 

what i was asking is how does a forum get a sponsor

 

Well, with vBulletin you can do this - but people want to sponsor a forum that's good, and is worth it.

 

It's impossible to know if they contacted the sponsor or the sponsor contacted them.

dnforum is a pretty big site so it's possible that the sponsors contacted them. But it's also possible that dnforum just contacted different sponsors and some accepted their deal(just because they are big). I guess it would be very hard to get a small-mid size forum sponsored.