Creating a paid community on top of the free community

[Shawn Gossman]

What do you all think about this strategy to earn a profit with a forum?

Create an additional community within your already established community. You create a lot of the same boards having to do with your main niche. But the boards are private and maybe go into more detail. You offer this as a premium membership and charge monthly.

Could something like this work? Yay or nay?

 

[Page]

We already have forums/communities doing that. But who really wants to have their own private boards and only themselves see their boards, Yes they might want to add some people to their list to view their boards.

 

[meetdilip]

Unless there is a huge demand and traffic, it would be unwise to create second-grade citizens on forums.

 

[Deleted member 4320]

I don't think having a paid only community is going to work unless you offer something truly unique and exclusive.

Forums (like this one, Forum Promotion) do have a premium only forum but it's one forum that is a sub-section of the main site as an added benefit. It's not something that is a main USP of the site itself though.

 

[Nomad]

I don't think people will pay to access the board. There are already a lot of good free communities, why would they pay to access communties

 

[Page]

People won't even join if the forum is in full locked paid only and will leave.

 

[Cam]

I’ve seen this concept do really well in different kinds of sports communities. One forum that comes to mind is a forum that is dedicated to Packers discussions. They have half of the forum open to the public, and then the other half of the forum is hidden behind an “Insider Access” paywall. It does really well there.

Their insider forums have unique content too, and that’s because of different connections the owner of the forum has to the Packers organization. He’s been able to giveaway tickets, interview players, and more.

 

[Deleted member 4320]

I’ve seen this concept do really well in different kinds of sports communities. One forum that comes to mind is a forum that is dedicated to Packers discussions. They have half of the forum open to the public, and then the other half of the forum is hidden behind an “Insider Access” paywall. It does really well there.

Their insider forums have unique content too, and that’s because of different connections the owner of the forum has to the Packers organization. He’s been able to giveaway tickets, interview players, and more.

How long has the community been going for though? I don't think you could start a forum like that now and have it work out well. It seems forums before social media took off retained members (like FP) but if you started a forum now I highly doubt that would work.

 

[Deleted member 17779]

I've thought about doing this on my blog. Creating a "gated" community where people who put money into my blog will get certain perks on my blog that everyone else doesn't. I've been trying to think of what I could add to my blog though before I implement this.

 

[Shortie_]

I feel something like this could work if you were to offer incentives that were worth the money for the access. The problem is that with so many forums that could offer the same incentives without paying, it may be difficult to get people to want to pay to have access to said site/forum if they can find it elsewhere. Unless you could find something that is completely unique to offer then something like this will either work or it won't.

 

[Nomad]

If you offer incentives to paid members for creating posts on your site, you might be able to make decent money. I have seen a lot of people doing this.

 

[Etini Willie]

There must be really something special that would be gained from the forum for the paid part of the forum to get subscribers. That thing must be valuable else it would simply not work.