If this forum makes $10,000 from Adsense per month, then I don't think it is big cash. This forum ranks around 200 - 400 in Alexa. Just think of the bandwidth and costs it would have taken to build this forum up. I would think it costs a good bit per month for hosting the forums.
A few weeks back, Shawn made a comment on the visitor log of DP. He said that a single days traffic log takes about 1 GB (If I remember correctly). He avoided the question on bandwidth and just said that it never reached 1 TB/ day.
A forum would use quite a lot of bandwidth with the amount of information that has to pass from computer to computer with the length of some thread pages plus a lot of the users have avatars that make up quite a bit of the page size. Overall I am paying around $0.09 - $0.17 for every 1gb I use on my hosting provider. With a forums as large as this I would think you would need to spend more on hosting as you would need fast and better servers in place plus other harder to make sure that is stays up and can handle all of the activity.
Where did you find the information on About.com? That is a lot more than I would have imagined. Eightperhour
Na forums don't take as much bandwidth as you are making it seem. Also if you needed more bandwidth for a site like this you wouldn't need to dip too much into that 10k a month. That is basically nothing. Now Youtube on the other hand is a different story.
Check out the video on Markus Frind making the big bucks......He makes between $5million to $10 million/year. http://ouchs.com/2007/06/11/inspiration-story-markus-frind-of-plentyoffishcom/
wow i would just say wow... my top earning till now was $450/month i really wish to go atleast $5K/month and i would sit home and relax with my google
Its odd I read the little story on plentyoffish and went to the site. I didn't see any adsense on it. Wonder why or if it only shows up to members who login. I clicked around to different areas myself and didn't find any trace of adsense.
Quite right. I also thing Shawn doesn't monetize the community to a greater extent because he doesn't want too, which is pretty cool if you ask me.