Let's say you built a gamer forum from the ground up and later bought another gamer forum. You could choose to merge one forum into the new forum or leave them both with intact communities. This might be the situation if both forums were equally the same size and had tight knit communities or protested at the idea of being merged with another forum.
Would it be possible to actually own two competing forums? Or, would you loyalty always be divided?
Well it would depend on the genre of gaming, if you were to merge the forums, I know of a few forums what were quite big and when they were merged, it seemed to be quite successful. However a merge can also be a disaster, as if it was strong and different community, they might not like the idea of a another community merging.
I would honestly just let them be, if they are both thriving communities I most likely wouldn't do anything to them, especially if the majority of both communities are against the merge.
If I ever had two forums that were large enough to self support both of themselves, and they both were on the same genre, I do not think I would merge both of them, unless there was some way to keep the members who got merged into the other forum to stay active on the forum they were transferred to.
Companies do it all the time. It's a good way to market to different audiences in different ways. There is always a little bit of overlap, but there is overlap between a star trek and star wars forum too. 🙂
That would be a tricky situation. It's like you now have ownership of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi brands. The best thing to do is to avoid making comparisons to each other. Just focus on the positives.
I think it is possible to own two forums in the same niche. However, it might be a bit weird and they both might end up pretty similar. However lots of people do that and have great success.
