DP has been valued at few million $$. DP may be one that succeeded where tonnes of other webmaster forums have failed. How lucrative is webmaster forums niche? What are the critical success factors? What is minimum capital outlay (especially marketing/ promotion costs) to start a webmaster forum that will hit 50,000 members and make $x,xxx profit per mth after 1 year?
50,000 members in a year? In current days for real people registration you will have to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of $$$ just for promotion, while hiring some admins to get it going.
I'd say it's a highly competitive niche! Most forums fail because of lack of traffic. It would be easier if u had a website or blog with good traffic aimed at webmasters, so you had existing traffic to feed to the forum to get it started.
keep in mind...a webmaster knows how to make a forum...so all your members will be potential competitors. a webmaster forum won't be easy to market...there is more than enough competition around. I wouldn't even think of starting a webmaster forum.... unless I have expertise that not many other forums can offer.
There are far too many webmaster forums, take a look at DP, then at the other major webmaster forums, the number of posts and members differ by a huge amount. Even the closest competitors of DP are struggling, few if any will succeed as in DP. IMHO there isn't really any room in this market. The major players are entrenched.
Forums are probably the hardest thing to get going, no matter what the niche. Sure it's easy to set up, but getting people to sign up and post on a regular basis is tough. If you really want to make a website for webmasters, put up a site that offers exclusive/unique tips and tricks. As a web designer myself, I know I spend hours every day scouring the web looking for answers to my web development problems.
I would say that its a saturated niche where many webmasters have tried and failed, if it were ten years ago or fifteen then i would say go ahead. But not now the time has been and gone. Will.
There are already a ton of failed and failing webmaster forums. It won't be easy to take over DP and Sitepoint. Not to mention you are also competing with Warrior forum, Webmaster Talk, V7N, Namepros, etc. Have fun!
Agreed.I don't think you can make a lots of $$ from this niche nowday.. There lots of competition in this niche There no room for new comer