Good post, just because Dp is the Best one for people who can earn and want to gain knowledge in online. there is no forum is like DP at present.
DP gain about 400 new member in the last 24 hours...thats more than 10 new member each hour...Since my forum started, i'm averging one per day and I dont think my SEO is up to standard, i'm not index into googel, I dont purchase any links or stumble yet. In the Next 30 days I should be doing 2 to 5 per day, then one day I will able to get a $100,000 server and doing 500 new member per day. My goal is to have a business forum with business alike people from all over the world who share and exchange busienss ideas, form partnership and received answers to business related question.
The success of dp can be partly attributed to the ease with which you can handle the forum (excluding the infractions), friendly community and the number of do follow signature links (It is four!) and the last but not the least the hard work of Shawn in marketing it
I think its all about marketing..I along wih my friend created a entetainment forum 1 year ago which was having 48000 members...but later we shutdown the site for some legal issue..
He claimed in the NY Times that it was because it was the first adsense revenue sharing forum. Also that in 2005 he was making $10,000/month from just adsense through here. Wonder how much now? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/technology/16ecom.html
DP grown to todays level because of the contributing webmasters. Also Shawn, admin and the mods care about this forum.
I think one of DP reason for success it how well it's doing in Google, the traffic that is coming from search engines is huge. I remember in the past, before even joining DP I was searching for something really off-topic and I ended up here. Ofcourse I didn't join at first, but I kept the site in mind.
Its how i found DP this way too, i used to keep finding myself ending up at this place while searching for various info, i never joined, then one day i looked properly and thought wow its packed with info and very busy, so joined.