Why forum business is so difficult?

recently i have noticed many ads selling forums here in DP. I have read about all the hard work that goes into making a forum successful. You must have also seen many forums that hardly have 10-15 members even after months of launching.

I never had a forum but looking at these ads I wonder if there is really any scope of making big in it? what do you think whether forum have benefit over sits/blogs? If yes then in what field and If not then why not?

 

some do and they are the most popular part of one of my sites. I just simply struggle to make much more than $10 a month off of the site even with 200,000+ hits a month

 

thats sounds really very hard on u danny. must be taking lot of ur time. how old is ur forum? and what is it about?

 

my site is about 2 years old now it is a rugby league supporters site with over 1000 members and about 700 of those are active!

Just not big ad clickers! I have just implemented a few things to make the adds a bit more attractive and a bit more blended so hopefully it increases.

Luckily I have a good team of mates who just love the site and the team and they do most of the work. I just do the house keeping and coding they do most content.

 

oh the url is http://www.silvertails.net

 

I also have a forum it earns a bit say around $30 to $35 per month in adsense. But that is not the kind of earning that one would expect. It is just there for my personal satisfaction that "Yeaaaah!!!! I also have a forum."

 

I agree, forums are not by definition "made foe money" sites.
I think they are there basically for the satsifaction.

 

definately not one of those makeit-forgetit business model. But I am sure someone must be having a successful forum too, what might be the secret behind that?

 

Yes it is hard to build up a good forum, with active/quality members.
But once you get a couple of thousand of members, if you know what you are doing you can really make great money of it.

You got to find a nisch, which people really like to talk and write about, and that is not very easy.

I have a friend which have a forum with 60 000+ members, and he is making quite big money from it, so that is my goal with my forums =) he he

//Andreas

 

CPC is tough to do with forums as people are there to read posts and quickly become adblind. There are three simple ways to make decent money with a forum...

1) Sell your own CPM advertising to related merchants
2) Sell subscriptions to your site, offering more features to paying users
3) Plaster your archive with ads and get the archive well listed in the SEs... first time visitors coming from SEs will click on the ads

Of course all of those require a forum with decent traffic, a membership base, and new posts daily.

 

main struggle is to get that three figure members or should i say first couple of hundreds. working on a niche might get u lot of members but then if the ads pays you one third of what it pays for forum like DP then even couple of thousand members won't be good enough. seems like a deadlock to me.
what's ur friend's forum into?

 

It really take time to grow the forum. a lot of time and effort spend on the forum. but the reward is also good. you can promote a lot of things after you get a successful forum. Normally it takes a few years for people to familiare with that forum.

 

yes diamond you are absolutely right, forums takes lot of time some times years to make its name. I wonder if anyone in DP has any experience with forums. Maybe shawn can share something here, afterall its his forum

 

i too am having a very hard time setting up my dream forum.

I even started competition for the top posters. Im offering 3 prizes and I only got 2 contestants! Can you imagine that??

 

yes i can image what kind of hard time you might be having with your forum. Even if you give big prizes people find it difficult to believe because few members. how old is ur forum?

 

the competition i started is on digital point.

Im offering 3 free sitewide links to top posters.

6 months 1st prize
3 months 2nd prize
1 month 3rd prize

Yet nobody is intersted to join. The forum is like 5 days old!

see what i mean......

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=82774

 

yes i see. But you should have some patience, its only a week old. Contest is a nice idea. Maybe you can give winners some choice of chosing any 6/3/1 months from next 12 months for which his links can be on ur forum, that way people won't have doubt about PR stuff.

 

You willing to auction off some of those users ?

 

thats some news. I always believed that tool section is suppliment to the forum, but u r telling that its actually gave birth to this forum. interesting. I guess with 10K+ users it was completely different story for u.
Still was there any other problem u might have faced during your initial time that might be of some use to DP members like "girl" and others?