The Ecig and vaping forums are another example of thriving niches in the forum world. Sometimes it really is all about the niche.

1 among ....???

Some days before last Christmas I had some free time and I decided to check how many of my clients sites, (for sales done at 2007-2008) are still active. So:

~ 70% were dead domains. No websites at all.
~ 15% were using different forum software
~ 5% were using Wordpress instead of vB (or any forum)
And only about 10% were still using vBulleting with almost a share of 50%-50% vB3 and vB4.

Then I did another test. This is a test that anybody can do. Try in some popular mods here and start clicking on website links in the first posts (means posts about 4-5 years ago). You can find the links in posts like "I installed it but I'v some errors in my site ....mydomain.com"... You'll get the statistics very soon.

From my clients forum, this is my understanding on how forums die/evolve.

Initially people open new forums for the hype of being an admin, if it goes well and if at all they make any income they continue to maintain their forum. I've seen people running forums even for a very close user group, just for the joy of maintaining a forum. If the activity of their forum drops down or if they lose interest they shut down their site.

Only focused people know what they are doing and still continue to maintain their forums & overcome the obstacles of social networks in a very smart way.

This hardly is very telling. There always has been a rather high fluctuation on forums, and only a rather small percentage actually made (and make) it over the first, say, five years, or develop a large user base.

BINGO! That is pretty much exactly what happens with a lot people who start one. Then you have the ones who start it because "it looks easy enough" and then when they get into it and realize the costs, time & work that goes into quickly lose interest and the forum dies a painful quick death.

Very true indeed. And to actually accurately find out what the stats are there would need to be some sort of development involved, but I know/realize that Christos was just giving examples and I do not think what he posted he meant was set in stone per se.

Forums are not dead. People are putting a higher priority on social networks rather than their own websites, is all.

{begin sarcasm}Sign in using this social network if you want to join a different website. If you want updates, follow me on this social network. Oh my goodness, I have 10,000 likes (yet none of them turned into sales or active members!) so I must be doing something right because people liked it.{end sarcasm}

Forums are still alive. Just not as alive as they use to be.

Very true I have to agree.

Yup, as we can all sadly see

This one is.

:up: