I've no idea about how to earn from forums with ads. Do you use ads on forum ? What type of ads you use ? CPM or CPC ? Do they cover your hosting costs ? If you're using CPM ads, which advertisers allow to use CPM ads on forums ? Let's discuss about forum monetization.
I have used ads on a forum. Google Adsense might be something you're looking for if you want to make some money. They rely on the ads actually being clicked though.
And for some offers you make with your own advertisement system, it depends on how much your pricing is for ads on your site, and how much traffic that your site receives.. You can sometimes make enough money to cover the costs, and even make a lot of profit off of it.
But some of the sites that are filled with ads seemed totally ridiculous to me.
Michael agree with you on too much of monetization. But it depends on design of forum. Some people don't make use of design to balance between design and monetization. If they do that then in my opinion site will be less annoying when ads are used.
Hmm, there are many forums like that. I can see many forum owners having trouble with working around themes to benefit from monetizaton.
Especially simplemachine forum owners. There are lack of good professional themes for SMF. So it is hard for them to monetize. I have SMF forum and i know how hard it is to monetize an dwork with design.
My site has a single banner ad on ever page, from adsense. It more than pays my hosting costs. In another 6-12 months, Im anticipating it paying off the initial $150 investment from buying the IPB software. After that, I'll have enough to start doing some give-away contests, and hopefully gain a lot more activity/members because of it.
A year's time, ~1.5mil page views, and ~350k unique visitors got ~$140 from that one banner ad. Im probably going to sell some ad space at the bottom of the forum in the future, but for now the adsense is quite good.
Just make sure you follow google's rules with it - if you break the TOS, they don't tell you that your account has been suspended until payment time (from what Ive heard) ;s
