Do you know any forums that make decent money of charging for subscriptions? If you were going to start a forum with subscriptions-- would you wait until the forum has a TON of members first then start charging for premium membership or would you start charging from the beginning?
I would wait because NO one would pay for nothing. But in reality I don't think anyone would pay to sign up. I know of a few. The way they work it is yes its a forum. With movies and hentai manga. Membership is free but to download the the stuff uploaded by the admin you had to buy a "gold"membership otherwise you could only download stuff uploaded by other members but they used those free file hosting sites like hotfile you can only download so many times per day. The gold membership files were hosted on the forum site. That site actually makes a lot of money. But forums take time to grow. Once it does it can run it self.
Commercially speaking, to start getting people to pay even before you have built up a substantial audience and following is impractical. Tactically speaking, one should first build up a hungry crowd, then start charging the 'gluttons' among this crowd for 'more exotic dishes'.
You will need to build a substantial following before trying to implement any type of subscription or offer content that is extremely valuable.
I just can't see people willingly signing up for such a thing. With so many "free" forums avaliable, it just wouldnt be worth it...
thanks all for the replies. I just cant see why anyone would pay $x.xx to use a forum when there is always something like it for free, or even receive 500 PM box size vs 25pm's, or a cool user title.. I mean who really cares.