Making actual MONEY with a forum?

[Acorn]

I'm pretty naive, maybe, or just pessimistic? because I never believed it was possible to make actual money with a forum--at least not enough money to offset the costs of running it.

So, I'm an oldie here now and most of you other oldies know my deal--I'm the one with the giant proboards. Recently though I've been looking into an SMF conversion. Assuming that all goes well, and the hosting is affordable I'd like to set up some kind of ad revenue system to support the board. How much revenue could a board of its activity level expect to earn, and through what kind of ad networks? How do you set something like that up?

also looking into setting up a domain name for the board to mask the proboards one several months prior to the move, if the move is decided on. I want to let the new domain name overtake the current proboards one in google rank and then, after that has happened, switch the domain name over to the new forum address. Would THAT work smoothly or might I "take a hit"?

 

[JamesD31]

Well, an easy way to manage advertisements is with http://www.openx.org (I use it for all sites on my network), for publisher networks (which is what it is called fyi) I would start with AdSense. Though, there are other, bigger and higher paying ones like doubleclick and others that require hundreds of thousands of impressions per month to even be considered.

 

[Watch Me Sink]

You can definately make money. Right now, my server costs/domain costs are about $3 a month. If I were to put banner ads on every page, I'd probably make at least $5 a month, or more.

And if you plan on acting on the SMF conversion, I can help you with SMF. I've already given some assistance to hcfwseker.

 

[Raymond]

I'm going to be keeping my "forums" ad free however I will be gaining money straight through my Store which sells our clan t-shirts/ clothing line and also going to be getting a cut of my friends online gaming store. so I'm set.

 

[Acorn]

Thank you so much guys.

You can definately make money. Right now, my server costs/domain costs are about $3 a month. If I were to put banner ads on every page, I'd probably make at least $5 a month, or more.

And if you plan on acting on the SMF conversion, I can help you with SMF. I've already given some assistance to hcfwseker.

Yes I am beginning to seriously consider it, though I have a lot of questions to be answered before I do. Any help would be wonderfully appreciated.

hundreds of thousands of impressions a month? Well, we get around 1000 a day, so that's be 30,000 a month about, I guess once I've grown my site up more I can consider it then. I'll be happy at first just to cover my overhead.

My issues are ones I've raised on the other boards of this forum where they seem to fit best. They pertain to finding a good solid affordable host that does NOT limit bandwidth and then finding out what that would cost. I am considering large hosts with a lot of safety against hack attempts. I've seen too many forums hacked to consider any less than top safety. Basically, I have a few hundred people who put a lot of trust in me and I don't want to fail them.

 

[Gimgak]

Hey one thing about those big hosts, I seriously would not recommend one of the big oversellers for a community of your size. Get someone like hawkhost who is a mid-sized host that lets you use all of your resources, someone like dreamhost or hostgator would suspend you for CPU usage not long after you signed up.

And owning an RPG board I believe you could make money with VIP subscriptions, wouldn't need more than a couple subscribers to pay for the hosting.

 

[Watch Me Sink]

http://xisto.com has great hosting. You can get 1GB disk and 50GB bandwidth for $3 a month. It has a good amount of clients, but the company is small enough that support tickets are replied usually within a few hours.

I think that advanced hosting is definately the way for you to go.

 

[Acorn]

Thanks for the tips!

I will not go with ANY host who'd have any chance of shutting us down. That's just OUT. If they've shut anyone else down for overage in the past, I won't even consider it.

By "impressions" do you mean unique hits a day or page views? We get around 20,000 page views a day. Often 30,000 on weekend days. I have no access to actual bandwidth measurements so have no way to gauge what we are actually consuming.

Cloverfield's Futurama forum seems to be about our size, same with Pokemon GTS. Wonder what they're using? Also...hey, wait, FP is also about our size. What do you guys use here?

By "advanced" hosting do you just mean paid hosting?

$3 a month would be a dream! I could afford that indefinitely. But, sadly I don't think anyone will actually host our site for that little. I think we're racking up a bit more bandwidth than 50 gig a month. As for disk space, we're probably well past the 1GB mark. We add around 14,000 posts a week and over time that number seems to be edging up.

I'll check out Xisto.com and also see what some other large boards on Big Boards are using. Particularly sites a bit larger than ours. Because I don't expect us to start shrinking after the move....I need a host that would allow for growth.

 

[Antarctic]

Thanks for the tips!

I will not go with ANY host who'd have any chance of shutting us down. That's just OUT. If they've shut anyone else down for overage in the past, I won't even consider it.

By "impressions" do you mean unique hits a day or page views? We get around 20,000 page views a day. Often 30,000 on weekend days. I have no access to actual bandwidth measurements so have no way to gauge what we are actually consuming.

Cloverfield's Futurama forum seems to be about our size, same with Pokemon GTS. Wonder what they're using? Also...hey, wait, FP is also about our size. What do you guys use here?

By "advanced" hosting do you just mean paid hosting?

$3 a month would be a dream! I could afford that indefinitely. But, sadly I don't think anyone will actually host our site for that little. I think we're racking up a bit more bandwidth than 50 gig a month. As for disk space, we're probably well past the 1GB mark. We add around 14,000 posts a week and over time that number seems to be edging up.

I'll check out Xisto.com and also see what some other large boards on Big Boards are using. Particularly sites a bit larger than ours. Because I don't expect us to start shrinking after the move....I need a host that would allow for growth.

I ran a forum which was gaining around 1,000 posts a day and is now at 500,000 posts on www.hostgator.com

No problems at all, very fast servers and great support. Don't go for ANY free hosts or new hosts, chances are they are not set to have large forums like yourself on their servers and will probably shut you down.

So go with an established host and look into sites which are hosted there before doing anything.

 

[Cloverfield]

Cloverfield's Futurama forum seems to be about our size, same with Pokemon GTS. Wonder what they're using? Also...hey, wait, FP is also about our size. What do you guys use here?

I actually have a custom package with www.PrimeXeon.com. He is the tech Admin of the forum so was able to do me a great deal. The forum is incredibly quick because of it as there are no other forums on the server.

 

[Leo Ghost]

Forum Promotion uses HawkHost for their hosting, and so does Admin Community as well as several others. I used HawkHost myself for awhile and I must say that there wasn't anything wrong with their service at all, I only moved due to a need for offshore hosting.

 

[Acorn]

Oh, i'm already doing what antarctic suggested: Actually look into what forums these places host AND how long they've been around. I do NOT want a host to die under me, even though I would have the ability to move the entire thing to a new server much more easily a second time around, it'd be a real hassle. I particularly want to look at hosts that are fast and host at least one "major" forum.

Will look at HostGator and Hawkhost.

Thanks again guys!!

Now...how do I estimate how much bandwidth my forum uses? I host all my images and stuff offsite on an image host so that wouldn't really factor into it, and I would not be allowing attachments either because of disk space. Almost everyone hotlinks their images from image hosts anyway.

 

[NBK*Twitch]

Just throwing this out there,but if you need help switching to smf I myself can also help.

 

[Cloverfield]

Acorn if you have cpanel that will tell you how much bandwidth ect you're using.

 

[Watch Me Sink]

Acorn if you have cpanel that will tell you how much bandwidth ect you're using.

He/she currently is on proboards, so he/she doesn't have access to that.

 

[Acorn]

Thanks to all you guys who've offered to help me in the conversion. I'll need all the help I can get! I would appreciate it so much.

And yeah. I don't have access to crap. 😛