Free Non-Adverted Forum Hosting - How do you profit?

Discussion in 'General Marketing' started by Sam Baker, Apr 15, 2007.

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  1. #1
    I've seen a few site's that offer no-adverts free forum hosting, well, how the hell do they make money, profit or no profit, I don't see any income method. I ask this because I'm interested in doing the same but only to gain traffic to the rest of the content on my site (which I won't reveal just yet). I'm just curious how they make money.

    http://www.freeforums.org/ is a good example of the sort of sites I mean.

    How do they do it people?
     
    Sam Baker, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  2. Paukz7

    Paukz7 Peon

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    #2
    They just want to make their website popular at first I guess and than at one day put ads on :)
     
    Paukz7, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  3. politician

    politician Peon

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    #3
    Just a guess, but probably either sell or spam all the email addys they get.
     
    politician, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  4. Sam Baker

    Sam Baker Peon

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    #4
    Okay well my site, PhpBB Three, is basically a resource site for the upcoming 3.0 version of phpbb, well resources is it's primary objective, do you think it'd help the traffic of my site, when released, if i have free forum hosting, i can afford a £10 GBP reseller and I have found a nice one but what I'm thinking is that it will bring in more traffic and then people might notice that they can buy forum skins, icons etc. Another option could be to have 1 google ad on free forum hosting and then pay a small price to get rid of the advert

    what do you all think?
     
    Sam Baker, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  5. bigp

    bigp Peon

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    #5
    Hook users to the site. . . once you've got an audience, then you run ads
     
    bigp, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  6. BigBadWolf

    BigBadWolf Well-Known Member

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    #6
    Yes, its called the free until your popular method :D
     
    BigBadWolf, Apr 15, 2007 IP
  7. FreeForums.org-Advisor

    FreeForums.org-Advisor Peon

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    #7
    Hello Sam,

    Thank you for your interest in FreeForums.org. We generate revenue through paid upgrades and premium services, so there is no need for ads. You can read our news post "Ads? Not in our forums!" for more information.

    If you have any other questions please let me know.

    -FreeForums.org Team
     
    FreeForums.org-Advisor, May 1, 2007 IP
  8. phpbb24

    phpbb24 Peon

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    #8
    We are running 35000 forums on 7 servers and I have been looking into doing like you, freeforums.org running without ads and getting small incomes like you, and I came to the conclusion after calculating, that I would never be able to run the most expensive and fast HP servers with 6Gb ram, 15k rpm raid 5 disks, without having ads.
    I am saying this from being in the business since 1998, running phpbb forum hosts since 2004 starting in Sweden, so I know now what's it's all about, atleast more or less.

    For most of our users it's not so important with only one ad banner on the forums, since our forums runs extremely fast and we have extremely good uptime, and right now freeforums.org is down since yesterday. Some of our users have been trying ad free forums hosts, and some of them came back with the tail between their legs and wanted to come back.
     
    phpbb24, May 6, 2007 IP