4 replies to this topic

[Kevin]

Here's something I've been tossing about in my mind over the past number of weeks and I'd appreciate a comment or two.

It seems to be conventional wisdom that Forums like this do not make money. That it is difficult to get people to engage (this certainly seems true here).

But I wonder if this is really the case, I'm starting to question the conventional wisdom and starting to think that if you have the right niche forum then it will make a few dollars each day. Now that is not much but let's say you had 10 such forums each makeing 2 dollars a day = 20 dollars = 140 dollars a week.

Granted it takes a lot of work to get a forum up and running but surely if you have successful Forum and you can get members debating items it really should take no more than an hour a day to look after ten or so forums.

So the question is. If you go with Forums full time can you make money

Kevin

[despot]

I guess, you sure can.
You can earn even more than a few dollars a few from a forum.

But I think it's a lot better to have one big one than a lot little ones.

[glen]

i think as a compromise would be maybe 3 large forums. then you could survive if one of the forums lost popularity.

some of the largest forums around (not mine) get thousands of posts each day and are visited by over 10,000 people in a day. in those cases i think you would have to be onto a winner.

i have tried running a few forums now and i must say its a lot more fun than running other types of websites becauses it is interactive. and you get to meet lots of nice people.

though i would discourage the use of phpBB since it is spammer heaven and you will spend hours just deleting spam from your forums.

cheers, glen

[Kevin]

glen, on Dec 10 2006, 02:58 AM, said:

i would discourage the use of phpBB since it is spammer heaven and you will spend hours just deleting spam from your forums.

cheers, glen

I use phpbb and I know what you are saying. But I don't think the problem is as bad now as it use to be, especially since they included that section where you have to fill in an auto-generated code and then double confirm - most spammers will not go to that bother. Since shifting to the auto-generated code I've had no sex or pill sites making an appearance in my message board (hope I'm not going to regret saying that )

One of the problems I do have is spammers registering as members of my Forum; and an increasing number of these spammers don't display a url so I can't figure out what the are gaining, they certainly are not getting search engine recognition as there is no url displayed

Also there are quite a few modifications you can make to the phpbb code in order to close some of the security holes

My two pence worth

Kevin

[glen]

if you can see that spammers/scammers are joining up as members i would delete their accounts straight away and ban their email addresses. they might be just waiting for a security exploit to appear so they can damage your forum.