forums

i have purchased www.easportslive.com and havent put much work into it at all. Just recently i decided that maybe a forum would be the right thing to do with that type of site. would starting a good forum take a good bit of work and does adsense pay off in forums...

 

I hope you do not get a patent notice, since EA Sports TM is of EA.

 

i was thinking the same thing

 

Yep id watch out with TM names especially if it grows and becomes popular.

 

You probably would be alright with the TM issues as long as you are not taking anything away or charging any visitors for EA information. If you went the forum route, you should make sure you have disclaimers stating you are not affiliated with EA games and possibly have links to their support pages and their site. If you push their products without making a profit (push people to their site for game purchases) I can guarantee they will not fight with you.

As far as the Google ad sense is concerned, my experience with forums only yielded a decent profit if I used a hack with the forum that allowed me to display ad code in-between forum posts...of course that would break the Adsense TOS since you are suppose to have only 1 ad per webpage.

Placing Ad sense in the header or footer yielded very few clicks, for me at least.

 

I haven't heard of anyone getting rich or making any decent money off Adsense in forums. But a friend of mind did do pretty well with those embedded links on his forum. As for the trademark issue, just put a disclaimer directly underneath or over your logo that says you're not affiliate with EA sports. Should do the trick.

 

The problem I have had with forum's is that a majority of your users tend to be return visitors and they become blind to the ads on the forum pages resulting in a lower CTR.

The upside to forums is that the users/members are constantly developing new content for you. The goal would be, just like any other site, to be able to gernerate a large number of unique visits and the site should do well.

All in all I think forums do have the potential to be big gainers.

 

I've been able to profit a little here and there, but I don't believe there are too many forums that bring in big bucks except for the super large ones.

 

I totally agree with the opinions above regarding the income of forums, not very decent.

As about the TM issue, most of the TM/SM holders first act at WIPO (http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/) and most cases are won by the mark holder. I got burned once and the tragic aftermath is that you put tons of work into it and you will lose all the benefits in few days.

To all of you interested in buying domains containing TM/SM I strongly suggest to follow the WIPO address above and then this one: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=64nioc.1.1

Good luck!

 

Indeed, you have not put much work into the site.
Do you intend to remain passive about it?
You are on a good path for a very disappointing outcome that way.

I do agree that forums will not do it for you, unless you just feel the need to chat with others about the games on a daily basis.

If I were you, I would look for a decent RSS feed for electronic gaming, and put the news feeds on your news page. Otherwise, prepare to work your buns off updating daily.
Rss-to-Javascript works adequately for this purpose.

 

Claymation hit the nail on the head.
You will have to plan on spending hundreds of hours getting that forum popular if you want to turn it into an income generator.