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Drake

New Member
I'm wondering if it's possible to make some money from advertising on a web forum. Something on the order of a couple of hundred bucks to a thousand month. Nothing spectacular. But enough to generate a decent second income.

It would be based in Ireland with an Irish member base.

It's traffic would be moderately popular for an Irish website.

Time spent moderating and running the website wouldn't be a problem as it would be a subject area of genuine interest to me.
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
A lot will depend on the target audience.

If they're "banner blind" it might be hard to get a return
 

DanTheMan

New Member
I agree with blacknight. Generally discussion forums attract the same people over and over again, the traffic is repeat and not new. The repeat visitors tend to ignore the ads a lot more than new visitors.

I've a discussion forum with 3-4k Page Impressions per day which pays peanuts.
 

Drake

New Member
The target audience would be the geek crowd, which probably isn't the ideal demographic to begin with. A large chunk of them will be running Firefox + AdBlock. I guess there would have to be a huge audience for it to make any money at all by the sounds of it.
 

bucks

New Member
It is possible but from my experience it wont be from your typical banners..

As mentioned already you will have the same userbase returning day after day and they will soon turn a blind eye to banners.

One good way of generating site income is to try and get "site traders" on your site, these would be companies who sell products/services which relate to your forums target audience. Give them there own dedicated forum section in which they have some control over and it can be a win/win situation for both your site and the company.

You can see how it works on one of my forums, :: E30owners.com :: Irelands BMW E30 website
 

Drake

New Member
Hmmmm... that might be the way to go. I need to get a better grip of what the running costs would be too.

Does anyone have a rough idea of hosting costs for a moderate to high traffic forum with mainly Irish membership?
 

paul

Ninja
you would need to share a few stats with us
# of concurrent users
# of posts & attachments
# of new posts & attachments / day
# of new users / day

Then I guess someone could give a better idea as to what you needed.
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
You can start on a shared hosting plan and then go from there ..

If the traffic and revenue rise proportionately it shouldn't be an issue to scale it
 

Drake

New Member
Well here are some optimistic guesstimates on how popular the forum might be after maybe 1-2 years....

# of concurrent users: 100
# of posts & attachments: 100
# of new posts & attachments / day: 20
# of new users / day: 5-10
 

Drake

New Member
Yeah, those are probably conservative estimates. Maybe a little too conservative.

But like you advised, I could just start with a basic cheap hosting package and scale up if I need to.

Thanks for the advice.
 

zvioletz

New Member
yes you can earn some bucks but if you think that it's gonna be big,, it's not unless if your forum will be like dp
 

irislogic

New Member
Can someone please explain how exactly you earn from a forum? Do you earn through the ads or the traffic or the number of members you have on your forum? Someone please enlighten me. Thanks.
 

Dublin Domainer

New Member
One good way of generating site income is to try and get "site traders" on your site, these would be companies who sell products/services which relate to your forums target audience. Give them there own dedicated forum section in which they have some control over and it can be a win/win situation for both your site and the company.

You can see how it works on one of my forums, :: E30owners.com :: Irelands BMW E30 website

That's an interesting idea, Bucks. But how do you make money from these traders? Charge them for posting or maintaining a presence or what?
 
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