Trying to start free forum hosting service..

Hello everyone, i'm new here as you can probably tell.. one day i was browsing ebay for websites for sale, and found a free forum hosting site that was making $2k a month USD in revenue, the site sold for over $20k. From that day i got the idea to try something like that myself, i found out the script they were using, bought it myself.. bought a domain and hosting and designed a basic site for the front end. It's all pretty much up and running now.

I'm not sure if im allowed to post it here.. so please remove it if im not supposed to. It's www.emforium.com (this is mine, not the one that sold..)
Do you think a service such as this would be worthwhile trying to promote? i mean the site that sold on ebay was hosting about 15,000 forums and had to be on a dedicated server (around $300 a month).

I've had one signup.. the site's been online for about 2 weeks now, and this one signup isn't being used at all.
heres an example of a forum http://tyson.emforium.com/
its got adsense at the top and bottom, but I might apply a hack later to put ads in between posts. I've done a couple of link exchanges as you can see, but they havn't been reciprocated yet.. dont know why they're taking so long.

What i worry about is because its all forums, it will be just mainly repeat visitors, and these wont be generating much cash will they... Does anyone have any tips? or should i just let this go and try to go for a content based site..

 

Without trying to discourage you, I personaly believe this market is already saturated and people aren't really starting that many number of forums as it used be in early days of phpbb (at least they are not using phpbb).

Good Luck to your business thoguh, hope you hit the gold

 

I agree with the above, although it takes one person to make me wrong, the market is heavily saturated, with hosting being so cheap and domains being $4-$9 if it was me I would just start my own, free is good but it is just a stepping stone for forums I would think, being able to keep the forums would be the hard part.

gl

 

Thanks for the replies, i totally agree with you... i guess i should have investigated further before diving into it. I've got a few other things happening.. ebay business, ebook on how to start an ebay business.. lol and i just got hold of a copy of that 'The Rich Jerk' ebook, and it says some things about being a traffic middleman, e.g buying traffic cheap from miva and optimising site for adsense clicks. I really want to get into this stuff, i keep getting ideas but never seem to follow them through. aarghh. need to get a credit card first to use with miva.. (im in australia)

 

Ideas and experimentation are your best tools.

This venture might fail or it might fly. Sure, you wont do as well as the one you mentioned because as other stated, this has been done so many times. But if you can come up with a feature that is needed and not currently provided, or you can market your idea wider than your competition you will be in good shape.

I am of the school that the get rich quick sites are few and far between, but you can do ok if you enjoy web design and can put in your time on a few worthwhile projects. It just takes time for things to grow.

 

Crop up with new ideas , i also think it is a bit hard and saturated market .

 

I have a free forum site.
Just sitting there taking up space.
Once I come up, or find, a new idea for the domain, will probably drop the free forum service.
Only idea I have so far is to make it a hosting site for forums, selling hosting like real cheap.

 

I did something similar, trying to host Gallery for free. What an unfortunate waste of my time!

Rich Jerk may make it sound easy, but you'll need to put in some hard work to get a decent revenue stream going.

The good news is, you can do it!