Monetizing a forum?

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Enigmabomb

Enigmabomb

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Feb 26, 2007
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Than Franthithco
Hey Guys,

I've got an existing forum with about 25k views per day. I've put adbrite on it, and I'm getting measly ctrs with low pay outs. It doesnt qualify for adwords because they post some adult oriented stuff. Ive put some CJ stuff on there, but its not targeted, so that sucks.

Any suggestions? Its costing over 200/month to run, looks like im going to maybe make 90 off of Adbrite. Need a better solution...


Josh
 


affiliate banners for ringtones, etc?

during tax season rotate those with tax aff ads, around xmas toy deals...etc etc...
 
Luckily, I'm not paying for it, my friend is. He's a different bird. He's got a huge allegiance to the board, but it's running him into the ground. Hes been running it for over a year without ANY monetization.

It's mostly internet junkies, former ebayers (who hate ebay), and they're mostly middle aged. How the F does one monetize that?

Josh
 
What you do is you fill it with ads and then charge 19.95 every six months or for a year to have an ad free experience. On top of that throw in some extra goodies and you should at least break even.

You said you have used adbrite and you have some adult stuff on there? Adbrite's other company has porn advertisers, look into that (can't remember the name now but I know you can use your same adbrite account.

Work on a redesign for better CTR. When I redesigned my forum to acommodate a new logo , I actually lost CTR (even though it's always very low on forums).
 
forums are known to have bad monetizing capabilities than a normal website.
This is how i would see it, u got around 25k page views, so if each visit gets u 20 page views, i assume that u get around 1000-1500 visitors, out of which 50% would be returning visitors, returning visitors are virtually blind to a the forum ads, so daily there are around 500-750 unique visitors daily coming to ur website. I agree u are generating pretty low $ but u aint using adsense from where people are making the most, so u need to be comparing urself with people using adbrite and CJ.

My piece of advice would be to wrap ur forum with a complete website which would have other money generating capabilities.
 
Same, make a homepage and have like recent discussion boxes and all that and make the main page have funny stories about eBay or something relevant and pimp it out with adsense (no adult on the main page keep it to the forum) and put affiliate ads on the site and forum.
 
Enigmabomb said:
All great suggestions.

Has anyone tried this "Ad free experience" with phpBB? How does one differentiate paid users from non paid?

Josh
Click to expand...

By using usergroups. Put all Ad free people in a usergroup, then see what usergroup id it is. Let's say its "5"

So you have google adsense on your forum and you don't want usergroup 5 to see it you can put some code like this

PHP: 
<if condition="$post[postcount] == 1,2,3,4,6 AND !$bbuserinfo[userid]">

Adsense code here

Notice how 5 wasn't included in the showing of the ads.
 
I don't know, if the only problem is that the site is killing the owner, why not try to reduce the hosting cost from $200 a month to less than $90 a month. I'm sure a $50 to $60 VPS could easily handle the load.
 
The best way would be to sell links and banners on your website :) will give u a fixed income per month if you got good PR that would be a +
 
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