How profitable is a vBulletin Forum?

I was wondering how profitable can it be running a vBulletin forum? What are your experiences? I suppose it depends on the niche and traffic levels.

I've been thinking about starting a social network for a while and have tested out some of the open source options out there and didn't like them. I think forums are the best way to increase stickiness and traffic and benefit.

Also, is anyone willing to sell me their vBulletin license or know of any coupons/deals?

 

Forums are one of the worst business ideas. People click ads very little in forums, and it takes a huge commitment keeping spam out etc.

It only works if it is a unique idea, and gets a lot of time commitment. But you can probably do better and more profitable things with your time.
Or if you already have a site with decent traffic. That could work too.

 

If you have not already bought a license for VB I would suggest not buying a VB license.
If you are interested in potentially earning money from a forum it is doable with some effort on your end.

If you are interested in some tips and stuff send me a PM. and I'll see if I can help you out.

expenses with hosting a VB forum. is the VB license. (and mods that might cost money)
your domain, your hosting.

the most expensive upfront cost would be the VB license. which is 200.00 and up.

then you have your hosting. which if you want a decent one will be around 50.00 or so a month and up.

so you are realistically looking at 300.00 just to get it started. and then you are looking at many other things that can potentially cost you money as well.

I've made some good money on forums. and I've lost huge on other forums...

but I am willing to help you out... just drop me a message.

 

Thanks for the advice. What about car forums - they seem to be popular and make a lot of money with a lot of traffic? Do social networking sites fall into the same category, since they are mostly ad-driven? I'm more skeptical about social networking sites succeeding on ad-revenue alone (I Hear Facebook doesn't monetize as well for its expenses). The key is to get members to buy things or pay for premium services.

I wanted to create a forum that would have some 'dating elements' to it and allow members to custom search for profiles by age/gender/location/etc. I don't think its possible in vBulletin without a custom modification, unfortunately. Do you know anything about vB mods?

I think BlueHost hosting allows for vBulletin without extra costs. I have many wordpress blogs set up on bluehost, as subdomains.

 

Forums are one of the best earning sites but the start-up and maintenance is extremely difficult...

 

Get a forum popular and then try to monetize it. They are one of the most difficult types of sites to make popular, and they will not make money until you have hundreds or thousands of active users. If you are starting out with the intention of making money, I can almost guarantee it's not going to work.

 

There's better ways to make money than a vBulletin forum. There's tons of forums for anything you can think of as well. However, with the way social media is now, you can use Twitter, Facebook, etc. to promote your forum (not going to be easy regardless). PM me if you want Twitter followers (not free of course).

 

I believe you will need a niche one .

 

You don't need hundreds of thousands of users to make money but you do need quite a few.

If you are wanting to make a dating site... it would be easier to just use dating software.

it is possible to have a dating software and a forum run off the same DB so its using the same user information. its a little more difficult to do then just a forum or a dating software alone. but is possible to do.

when it comes to hosting you need good hosting. most shared hosting send out emails at certain intervals instead of instantly. this can be a huge problem specially if you require email authentication. it is possible that it could be minutes, hours, and even possibly days on certain shared hosting servers.

no matter how you go about it its going to be a lot of work. and you will not get a easy paycheck specially not at first.

on all my sites I charge for premium services. it can be anywhere from 5.00 a month. to hundreds a year. if you have a good product. this is what will make the most money at least in the beginning.

after you get a huge following you can start making money from ads.

but I would not bother with ads till later on.

 

Your are very wrong.. Digitalpoint makes thousands a week from google adsense. But yet, adsense isn't the way to go if your forum is small. I think the best and most profitable forums are membership forums. You can give an option to upgrade membership for a certain fee per month to access either vital information or continuous content that is unique. If you can get a few hundred subscribers/upgrades at even $10 a piece, your looking at some nice flow of income monthly.

Just think out of the box, something that hasn't been made or over saturated. Best of luck to you man!

 

DP has half a million members. Their monthly hosting and bandwidth is in the thousands and they have a hundred thousand dollar server setup. I don't think it's really an appropriate forum to compare to.

 

I wasn't comparing.. I was using it as an example..

I am just trying to express that membership websites are the money makers.

 

Takes too much time and you must have really good strategies in monetizing.

 

The bandwidth is expensive too, top forums could cost more than $3k / month just for bandwidth

 

I think Memberships are a good idea. Is it just free-premium subscriptions, or are your forums just closed to Membership Only. I would think it would be difficult to grow the site if there were no free users to populate at the beginning. I can see how offerring premium services/charitable donations would be successful.

But why would a user pay for a forum, when there are so many free options available on the web?

There are only a few niches worth paying for - such as financial investor trading sites, maybe car sites, specific job niches, insider secrets, etc.

I just don't see that many options for forcing paid memberships, because then you need to commit more time as well, and make sure the membership fees can pay for the customer service for operating the forum.

 

it would be for premium features.

most sites are setup to accept paypal for payments. and it would be all automated.

once they pay it would automatically put them in the Premium members group. and when the subscription is over it would take them out of it.

if you provide a good site. a lot of people are interested in helping pay to keep it going.

one of my sites has a extra forum. where people can argue with other members... with out any mod interaction. they can discuss things that are not allowed in the normal forum... and so on. while it is not a lot. its just a way of giving something to those who help contribute to the site.

 

Oh cool. Do your recommend vBulletin or something else?

I tried some open source forums on Simple Scripts, and only SMF-Simple Machines Forum has the functionality that I want. (custom profile fields and member search). But open source is a lot more work for other functions, I think. At least with vBulletin there will be customer support.

Yeah, I've seen some political forums where members pay donations. I guess it takes a lot of Free Users to build up popularity, and then start charging for premium memberships.

I tested PHP forum and all I got was hundreds of spammers. It just sucks that the open source stuff is easily spammed.

 

Forums are the best way of benefit for you,,but you should work hard regularity and quality will take you to success.

 

It has nothing to do with the forums platform. You can use any platform like MyBB, PHPBB, XenForo etc., but it all comes down to how much traffic you get, and therefore, how much earning you have from the advertisement. The traffic largely depends upon how good is your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and how well you promote it using the social media like Facebook, Twitter etc.

 

VB is a good software but does cost a lot to get started.

I would look into mybb.com its free, and very easy to use.

phpbb is also really nice. but to customize it is a lot more work.

mybb everything is automated so very easy to use.

if you start making money on the site and you really want VB, or IPB, or any other one you have to pay for then it might be a good time to upgrade to one of those. but to start off with I would just use a opensource.