This may have been covered under "demographics" partially, but what your niche or market is makes a big difference. What are advertisers paying for their adwords? Are they 10 cents a click or 50 cents plus? If you have a community that has high ppc rates and a lot of people competing for placement, you could make a lot of money with not all that many clicks.

HEhe, I feel very lucky!
With 0 SE traffic, literally 0.

We are making about $4-5K monthly.

This includes PPC ads, Chitika, Subscriptions and paid banners spots.

We could be making more if we have a salesman for the banners and paid text links.

Chitika making money for you?

I'm not quite into the "official" big-board status yet; 430k posts, 10k members, but on my site Adsense alone pulls in about $50/day, and rising daily... I only have ads showing for guests and non-paying members.

My "fun" site has 95,000+ users and had about 18,000 uniuqe hits a day. Since we lost the .com the number dropped but is rising again. I run a fully Add free site but am having no financial issues.

Not really a big board with these stats ( Threads: 1,631, Posts: 5,773, Members: 3,226, Active Members: 650) but I figured Id chime in. I get around 22k uniques per month, adsense is decent, it pays the bill. Worst part is it seems a majority of the users are from south america or asia area of the world, Which doesn't really pay out adwise. Looking at running an extra banner at the top to just sell off to some monthly sponsers. Im still on shared hosting, usually 5-25 online at a time, fair amount of posts. Forum is a few years old, but I started fresh when I setup my vb forums last september.

I have adbrite on another site that I co-run, which does pay out (net-60 my first check was $34). But they go in and analyze your profits later, and take away for the traffic from countries that don't speak english it appears. Had over $600 for the next payment, but its been knocked down to under $400. =/

Ive heard that adgage is good for ads, haven't checked them out yet.

I've just made it into big board territory with 520,000 posts and 10,000 members. I have 6,000 visits a day with 60,000 page views a day. Using Adsense, Amazon, Affiliates and fundraisers the board earns a modest amount a month. The fundraisers are the biggest thing.

We give away prizes donated by companies that benefit from the site. Prizes usually are worth $500 to $2000 each. And we generally have 7 or 8 prizes to give away.

We only do the fundraiser once per year, in the fall.

LOL

You have a verry nice site! You should considder AdWords feeding of traffic, I think it will work great for you.

I've been working on a secret money making hack for vBulletin, it's accepted with google and works great so far.

My forum is online now for 1 week and I have 60+ members and aprox. 400 unique visitors per day from Google AdWords and aprox. the same amount of traffic from own SE listings via an SE targetting system I ran on the site before I installed vBulletin.

The site makes aprox. $10 per day from Google AdSense + has sold 1 link via AdBrite ? $3 for 7 days recurring (real cheap, but it's a start).

:)

Best Regards,
Adult SEO

:banana: Wow its interesting to learn and see exactly how well you guys are doing compared to other websites.

Discussions like these are great and really put things into perspective in terms of where I should be financially and what my site should be earning.

Well I run a somewhat hugh site here in the Bahamas. Roughly a little over 10,000 members, good demographic hits and somewhat an average of about 5,000 - 6,000 unique members daily.

We offer email services, profiles and entertainment resources + some other stuff.

Monthly google ads range from anywhere from $285 to $500 due mainly to our photo gallery and forums. Once we re-introduce our Voice/Webcam I am hoping that it will increase.

We charge for different ad sizes on different pages for local businesses and entertainers/promoters having local events. This is where the bulk of our funds are generated which ranges from $75 for a small banner to $1200.00 (3 Month ads or sponsor programs).

Marley

I have about 60,000 page views a day. 4-5K unique visitors a day. I make ok money.

1. What niche
2. How much revenue per day (average)
3. How many signups per day

An answere on these questions wil be loved and very useful ;)

For new posters, please also state:

1. How many pageviews per day
2. How many unique visitors per day

I think Adsense is probably one of the worst ways to monetize a forum. Some of you have traffic levels that should not be leaving you in the hole every month. You need to look at some alternative forms of monetization. I know it is easy to throw up adsense or yahoo but that is rarely a way to make any money with a forum.

$1! so far..

It really depends on how you use it and for what niche you are using it. It can be great extra source of income for your forum.

If you can make 5000 euro extra per month by installing AdSense, why wouldn't you. Since that is possible if you have 100k+ uniques (per day) on your forum.

There are ofcourse better ways to make money with your forum, but AdSense can provide a solid extra source of income.

Best Regards,
Adult SEO

10,000 UIP perday
100,000 page views per day
52,000 members

earn $ 20 per month for banners

Yeah but we don't live in a bubble where you just ad adsense on top of something else. You might have other means of generating income or ways that don't harm the user experience or impact it in a different way.

By that logic, pop-ups and pop-unders also could generate extra revenue, but I would not advise most people to use those to monetize their forums.

hmmm, you could be making more :D

I think I made about $4-$5k last year from my biggest forums. It's a gaming forums (low PPC) with 300k posts and 10k members. I hope to be in Big-Boards within 6 months. I make most my income via subscriptions and selling points. I get about 2000-3000 uniques per day.

200,000 page views a day, 27,000 visitors according to google analytics - no ads :)

i m earnin about $400 a month :-D

Cool. And how many uniques do you have?

pff 600 average.

18k members

earning bout 7k GBP a month thats bout $11.000

Our forum is unusual in that it has only a few hundred active members, but averages 40,000 posts a month. We just hit 500,000 posts this year and will probably be at 1,000,000 by March. We lose an average of $20 a month.

I make enough to pay for the hosting a buy a couple new video games every month, not bad. Its free money!

-500 USD... I'm hopeless

My board/club has averaged about -$120 per month over the last two years. I have a little over 1,100 members, and about 275 active. Our only income currently comes from a few paid sponsors. We are slowly making more money, so hopefully things will turn around soon.

- Justin

I just started mine about 9 months ago, and traffic is steadily rising (still extremely small compared to some people on here):

Uniques a Day: 50-100
PageViews a Day: 600-1000

We just crossed the 500 member threshhold 20 days ago, and are closing in on 600 pretty quick (avg'ing 4 new registrations a day). Our net profit is about $20-$40 a month right now off the forum (from $0 not even 40 days ago). Only guests see ads, and we use adsense. I think the advantage we have though is that we are a financial site; some advertisers pay as much as $2+ per click which is great. Our blog and stock articles though bring in double what our forum brings in with 1/4th the traffic, it's weird.

Main Stats:
-581 Members (135 Active)
-6,448 Posts
-954 Threads

Cheers,

-FalkinPro
http://falkininvesting.com

Losing tons of money, but just joined with Clicksor and its showing great promise, payouts are already almost twice that of google/ypn. Check it out if you want to test the waters, but i'll warn you know you wont return to Anything else. Clicksor has been the best by far yet.

Just got it raised to 1200 a month! :D

hey folks,
i don't run a big board site, but i was wondering for some of the other members here who have stated there stats and aren't huge but are paying like $300 / month for hosting, what are you thinking? why would you pay so much?

read this:

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread24656.html

ok. so like everyone's covered most of range of possibilities... which is great and very useful (the point being..it is possible to at least not be in the hole every month).

so let's say someone has a new board and growing with all the required minimum whatever to make money.

HOW would you recommend that person implement their ads for the first time?

two parts:
1. what PLACEMENT are your best performers?

ie:
-- after first post?
-- after last post?
-- top of forumhome?
-- left/right column skyscraper banner
-- header?
-- pay donations? (placed where)
-- etc.

(this is the stuff that I would most helpful and love to hear discussion about at this point, imo)

2. and of course, what ad network do you use?

-- adsense? mirva? YPN/overture? monthly subscription banner ads ? advertising.c0m? other?


3. then we can compare across size and demo stats more meaningfully (imo)

anyone?

I just launched a tiny board for fun and a few friends to do their thing a few months ago, and haven't tried any monetization yet as it was just for fun. but monetizing is fun too. Knowing I'm nowhere near big-baord status yet doesn't mean I don't want to optimizse or ramp-up as best as possible.

so, like.... where would recommend one start?

How are you on big-boards with these stats?
Active Members: 74
Threads: 2,026, This Month: 69 (-19%)
Posts: 7,223, This Month: 165 (-46%)
Members: 158, This Month: 7 (7%)

Posts: 7,223
Members: 158

WOW

I'm on track to do about $60 in revenue this month from AdSense - 99% of that being from a single small add in my navbar template. This is my first full month with an ad in that location and my traffic is steadily increasing so hopefully my revenue will also increase. :)

I used to make some money at a big board but sold out and created a smaller private one. The big board made alot of money all by subscriptions. While similar sites were selling subscriptions for alot of money the membership was not growing. I figured that this was due to high subscription prices and started a site purely as a test to my theory. I ran 3 subscription packages at $5 a month recurring $15 every three months non-recurring and a $25 for six month package. The site took off to about 2500 subscribing members in a years time. . It was alot of money. And alot of headaches which I gladly walked away from it. I now have a small site with 180 members and about 145 are paying subscribers. Its private and the members have been together for almost 5 years. I profit about $600 a month and once a yaer give most of it back in raffles.

I don't intend to earn money, Apni Mehfil is just free for all to come and have fun

Well by tomorrow I should earn my first piece of money. $10. Since I only get like 350+ uniqes so my adspace is realy cheap.

I have had a recent jump in members and my google impressions are up to about 30+k a day

I have 172k+ posts and 1100+ members. And since july I have given google over 716,000 page impressions for a measly 133 bucks! 60 of that is all this month and 444,000 page impressions just this month. I really dont think its worth it considering it looks like google puked all over my site lol. I tried CJ briefly but was getting NOTHING.

Im on shared hosting but looking to move to dedicated soon. So when I move Im going add a few more payed mods and start up memberships! That seems to be the way to go!

I only get about 12 clicks a day though.... I need to improve my Meta....I think.

Oooh yeah, my site just turned one yr old and I have been a vb site since may.