Do Forums Make Money?

I have started a forum before and sold it approx a year later for 12K.

In my opinion if you find a market that is not being served/satisfied you can make money. If there is no one clamoring for the niche pet subject you are thinking of it could make it a real uphill battle.

If you go on forums and you see members asking for something added to the forum and the owners/admins do not address it that could VERY well be a good sort of forum to start.

For example(this is just an off the top of my head example) say you have a forum about triathlons and for 3 months the members keep requesting a section dedicated to triathlon racing schools. The admins wont add that section. Well a forum dedicated to talking about racing schools could do very well.

To make this go even faster, and this is how I did it, is if you find something the owner/admin of the first forum does NOT want to do. You contact them telling them what you are planning on doing and ask their permission to post on their forum about your new forum.

In my case the owner/admin was HAPPY to allow us to do this and it made all the difference in the world as we were able to get a large number of members fairly quickly because of the exposure.

Yes for SURE this forum makes money. I would imagine the owner(s) clear a million a year or possibly quite a bit more.

BUT it was started a LONG time ago and run VERY well. Those 2 reasons are why they have almost zero competition as far as I know. Look at other large forums most were started 5, 8, 10 years ago and kept going and going.

You STILL can break into owning a forum but you have to be even more creative and pay attention to detail, but it can be done successfully.

You can sell banner advertising to others to make money on your forum, or charge your members for premium membership.

Forum can make money but it depends from niche. There is some interesting CPA program which you can use on your board. It's good to have active and interesting community with forum.

It doesn't matter what niche you want to have your forum. Every time there is gonna be somebody who needs to do some promotion for some products, servis or other stuff.

But I just wat to tell you, to start a new forum you need to be prepared to invest a lot, and I am not exactly talking about money, you and probably not just you but a lot of your close friends from the niche will have to invest tons and tons of time to get it going, but it is not just about posting thousands of new threads, it is about creating good content that will help others.

Once your forum will be interesting enough, full of great content, it will get going very fast thanks to google and other search engines.

So if you are prepared to invest months and months of your time. I may tell you yes, it will make you a lot of money one day.

Hope it will work for ya.

Adam

Think about this forum.

List a WSO for $40 and it costs another $40 to bump it. From the time you bump it, there might be roughly 50 other people who bump theirs in front of yours over the next 24 hours.

50 x $40 = $2000/day

Then there is the Classifieds section and the Warriors For Hire section which work the same way, except it's only $20 per thread/bump and they don't move anywhere near as fast.

Then you have the War Room. $37 one time fee. How many War Room members are there? A lot.

Submit articles in the article forum? $5/month

Add images to your signature? $5/month

How about a banner ad at the top of the forum for a day? $100/day x 10 banners = $1000/day.

Obviously all of the above isn't factoring in things like transaction fees, hosting and all of the other things that you need to pay for when running a forum this size.

Basically, this is what it equates to:



Forums can be an absolute gold mine.

If you get a lot of members and traffic, they can make money. It's not easy to make money with a forum. Everyone is using WF as an example, but you would have a long way to go to match the traffic and membership of the WF.

While you're building, forums are a lot of work. They must be moderated and promoted constantly to get that membership up.

Here's Flippa forum listings.

https://flippa.com/buy/search?q=forum

It's clear the answer is YES. The question should be how long will it take to make a profit with a forum. Most successful ones have been around for a long time, Warrior for example. You would have to build and offer valve to members, this will take time.
Good luck if you do decide to take such a challenge the pet niche is a hot topic.
Well my Cats, Dogs, Horses and Rabbits think so.

Forums have great potentional... You can sell links and banners or even promote your other own sites in it for a great advertising

Between my two forums I can make upwards of $750 a month. Adsense usually brings in 450 no matter what and then I can sell header/footer ads to other sites/forums looking to advertise. I'd imagine warriorforum is VERY profitable

Yes, forums make money. but only top 3-5 forums make a lot of.(i mean 3-5 forums in 1 niche)

i have a friend who start a forum [making it a free membership forum] the niche is sexuality and he's making cool monthly pay cheque from google adsense alone. you can even start selling advertising space as your membership grows.

if you are using google ads Make sure you position your ads on must click areas.

All you will need to do is ADVERTISE.. ADVERTISE... ADVERTISE. both free and paid method. i guess you have heard "get paid to join forums" you can do that also if you have money to spend

Making money is surefire way to get an income.. But to get the forum running, and maintaining it... Well, that another thing..

Start a membership forum. Charge 10$ every month to be a member. If you have 1000 members after one year you will be earning at least 10,000$ every month.

Forums are hard work.. You need to have a good team starting off that will provide the initial valuable content to the forum.. Also, you need a team managing ALL the SPAM you will be getting.. Make sure you have a system in place to block all that spam..

Yep, everyone's right. Forums are extremely hard work because it's not just a website that you can keep adding content to when you feel like it, you have to manage admin issues and spam issues and forum members arguing. It's like being a bar manager at 1am!

It can get very frustrating at times. I had a forum to do with gaming and it didn't make me hardly any money with PPC, but as soon as companies and websites started paying for banner space, I made some really good money. Was it enough money to make the hassle of running the site worth it? Not for me. I still get a headache just thinking about it... :-)

I would love to see how many people giving out advice on what is needed in this thread ACTUALLY owned a forum which made money.

The responses in my opinion for the most part are COMPLETELY wrong.

How can you make a forum attractive to the masses? It's like that whenever someone visits an empty forum they tend to leave immediately. Do you guys encourage that one should shell off money to hire people to populate the forum and start a discussion? So that by doing so would attract your intended visitors, is that correct? Or should I keep my money and head off somewhere because the proof that no one is visiting means that I'm in a wrong niche?

You should NOT make it attractive to the masses. You should do just as you would with a business appeal to a niche.

Look at what I posted at the top. I took a forum from zero members to selling it for $13,000 just a year later and the Moderators who worked for FREE did all the work.

Banner advertising, adsense, paid subscriptions are some example of source of earnings for any forum..

LOGICAL PROOF:
This site is a forum > This site make money > Forums make money

Well, with my knowledge, setting up a forum is Quite difficult.
But once it is done, really it floods you some 1000$'s of $$$.
But till the forum is set, you have to do a hard work and next you can leave it and see it growing and bringing you money.
Good Luck..

This forum makes BANK apparently, but I've heard that forums in general are hard to monetize.

Not only do the forums themselves make money via ads, premium memberships, or even affiliate marketing, but the forum posters themselves can net in quite a sustainable income if they are frequent posters and have good contacts.

This thread is 2 years old already.
Do forums still make money now with the surge in popularity of social networks/social media in past few years? I mean by and large the conventional forum are not instantaneous with immediate responses/updates.
So is it better to start a social network and add a forum feature?

Forums are still hugely popular. Here's my list of the top 50 forums - WF isn't even in that list. How much are these forums worth? Given the junk that sells on Flippa if one of these babies came up for sale then they would sell for $$$$$.

The problem with forums is getting the ball rolling and getting real people to join and post. But once you have a few regular posters then you should be onto a winner.

Right niche and if you get traffic of course you can make money. It's a lot of work doing it right though.

Forums work great as long as there are a lot of people talking.. else, no

I run a few forums and I make a nice income from them... would I start another one? NOPE!!!

Its hard work and can be a headache :-(

I will sell mine soon enough :-)

Danny

If the main topic of the forum is something that you think people will be interested in you could try adding some advertisements to your forum site(beside the discussions), should you find some sites that are interested in adding their advertisements to your site. you could definitely make some money from them, provided you get a large number of viewers every day

I'm about to get into forums soon enough and I will take all the advice I can get myself at the moment, I know it's going to be hard work.

I'm running a webmaster forum and earning good with it thus I think if you start a forum to get profits, that's a good idea and I recommend it. But you will spent more time for the beginning time to develop a forum. I sure that.
Also if you need my support, let send pm me.

You're going to need some fantastic SEO in order to compete in that niche. It's already very populated.

1) You have to monetize it

2) Sell ad space on top and bottom of your blog

3) Incorporate Google adsense wherever you can

4) Charge people to join your forum once it becomes major in your niche

5) Market it like you would any other site/product

Just like everything, you make money by advertizing. They pay you money to advertize to an extremely targeted market.

For example, this site will advertize home business products. Where as you probably cant sell how to build houses info on here.

Your only problem will be keeping people on the website.

Yeah forums are good and have a great potential..But its hard to monetize buddy...

It's ambitious, but if you have the time to put in you won't regret it.

Yep...

But the beginning is the hardest...

I feel like forums that are brand new are a dying breed.

But there's always that one exception.

I say go for it. As far as monetizing it...

Do it the same way you would a site?

But if you're worried about flipping it on Flippa down the road...

You may want to reconsider.

Forums are pretty easy to monetise. The key issue is getting the thing started in the first place. It's a little easier to do if you can launch it from an existing site.

Most big forums were started years ago, but look for new niches to appear.

Yes, it is possible to make a lot of money with forums. Of course, the hardest part is finding people who will want to contribute to the forum on a regular basis. Still, if you manage to get enough traffic, throw some ads up and I guarantee you will make a decent amount of cash.

The problem is not whether or not you can make money from forums. The problem is whether or not you can generate enough traffic TO make money from your forum. Good luck!

This thread has succeeded in making me want to start my own forum!

A similar IM forum call Forum Special Offer sold at $30,000 on flippa, so it is profitable but the time and money you have to spend on the development and promotion are insane.