How to make income from a kids forum?

I was visiting some forums out there and someone is selling a very nice forum. It has a nice amount of users and is growing every day. only problem is that it is visited by kids and young teens.

What could someone do with such a forum? I mean, lets say you own it and make it reach 10,000 members... then what? No advertising network likes to be on forums, adsense clicks are worthless on these type of sites, you can't charge vip membership of anything like that... what could you possibly do to earn something with it?

 

A good question Fryman.

Television advertising aimed at kids is huge. Its the parents that generally do the buying. The aim is to get the kids asking their parents to buy the stuff for them. So there must be someone this same model can work.

Maybe you could have a sidebar with cool kids toys stuff sold at amazon. They see it then they want it and ask their parents?

 

i'd think if you could find a way to get those "shoot a duck win an ipod" fakey banner ads on the site, that'd be the way to get some revenue. I assume those are paid per click.

 

I am exactly on this point regarding one of my upcoming sites.

Thanks,

gamehouse

 

I think most of those are CPM ads. Otherwise, why would they want people to click the ppc ads without being "relevent traffic"?

 

Well... first of all, as I said getting CPM ads on a forum will be quite difficult since no good network allows their ads to be on forums.

And the television argument doesn't really apply here, because I wouldn't expect a kid to tell his dad to buy something from Amazon he saw on my site, it would be really difficult to get credit for it.

Those free ipod ads and similar stuff are CPA ads. Whoever clicks on the actually needs to do something else for you to get a lead credit. Even if it is something as simple as filling in an email address, all of those offers alwyas have a disclaimer saying that you need to be 18 years old or more in order to participate.

 

Agencies like Hurricane DM dont have any sort of demographic requirements. You'd be facing CPM rates at around .10-.15

 

They do make good sites for the Coop and Link Vault.

 

yeah, I know, but for that it would be better to have a dead forum. What about a live one, an active one sucking up loads of bandwidth and making you spend money on hosting every month? Why would someone want such a forum?

Yeah, that's sort of my point, you would end up using all kind of lousy network paying you peanuts

 

I think you could at least pay the hosting bills with the vaultage or weight that it would generate. With a big one with good PR you might get enough just by putting the network into your archives (assuming you're using vBulletin). I only mention it because I know you're vaultage hungry and I assume you know how to monitize it well.

 

How young are we talking here? Isn't it illegal to provide forums to anybody under the age of 13 without parental consent?

If that is the case, that almost rules out any forums for pre-teens, imo.

So you're left with teenagers - why can't you market towards teens? There are plenty of sites and services out there that would love to market towards teens...

 

COPPA only applies if your site collects personal information about kids under 13.

 

Ah, ok - got it

In that case, I would also ride the tv market bandwagon...I dont see why ads for toys and what not wouldnt work for the forums...as a matter of fact, they might even be more effective on kids than adults since the kids dont even understand the concept of advertisements.

Regardless, running forums is not all about money. In fact, if you are looking to make money on the internet, I would recommend against forums Either way, I do think you could pretty easily cover the costs of hosting off of these ads

 

Totally agree with you, the main reason I avoid forums like the plague is that getting income from them is tough as hell. And making it from a kids site seems even harder.

Forget about LV, coop and similar stuff, what I am trying to figure out is how would you monetize such a forum. And not talking about a couple of hundreds bucks, I mean really monetize a big forum with thousands of young users.

Some of you keep saying that banners about toys and flash banners would work... question is: where are you going to get those banners? Once more I have to say that the big networks don;t allow advertising on forums and getting leads from CPA ads would be difficult to get for the reasons I posted above.

 

Hmmm, I just realized since Fryman is in Mexico, COPPA hardly applies to him.


Fryman, I think you could just expand your thinking a bit. I don't know how much weight/vaultage a site like that could produce, but say it would produce a few hundred in revenue a month. Why not do it? Instead of trying to find one single factor that's going give you a grand slam home run, look for a number of base hits and doubles, you'll win the game better that way. besides, if you get hooked on a single source of revenue, you may find yourslf in a bind if it ever dries up.

 

Do Shoemoney-like promotions. Let them do something and the winner gets something as sponsored by an advertiser. Plenty of retailers in the kids market who can help you out with freebies in return for exposure I'd imagine. Like a treasure hunt on their shop and first to solve the riddle wins whatever they offer. Advertiser gets his visits, your kids get the prize and you can charge whatever for the effort and ad space.

 

I would say that you are going to have to market to advertisers directly. Money is out there, you just have to track it down yourself. Inspire your community to do some of the legwork, suggest advertisers - maybe even contact a few. Since you are in the teen market, you are in a different world as far as advertising goals - direct click-to-revenue isn't what people should be looking for - they should be looking for things like market saturation, branding, name recognition, viral campaigning.

Also - it's worth talking to some off-line ad agencies dealing with the market you are in and seeing if you can't cajole them into throwing some business your way. Something like - throw in a 50% discount to our published rates in order to close a deal - or as a loyalty bonus to your existing customers. And give them 25% of the revenue for the leads.

 

Okay so since my post was deleted (I'm guessing because I offered up my affiliate link), I would still like to suggest that you use dreamhost for your hosting if you're worried about the traffic generated from the forum. You get one terrabyte of transfer and 20 gig of storage for 7.99 a month.

And I would totally suggest that you go with image ads. Kids are much more likely to click on those. Not sure what there's out there though.

 

I agree. With something like this, you'll have to go after advertisers yourself. I'd visit other kids sites and see how they monetize it. I just checked out www.nick.com and they had ads for Pop Tarts. Going after these big companies may be difficult, idk, since I don't have that experience but I'm sure you could also find smaller niche companies out there.

 

well try to sell stuff to the kids, like cds, clothes, etc or add games ads or create an area for playstation, ipod, etc.