whats the link to your website ?

pm me

I won't go much into detail, but we are seriously considering our options at this point.

Our gaming community has been around for several years (1998) but we lost a bunch of members with a move to a newer game.

We currently have around 90 members, 34 of which are active.

We are lucky to get 3 posts/day, and 1 registered/month.

I know it is a niche site, and that everyone has a gaming community these days, but it's so frustrating in the same instance.

Not only have I not made money on this, over the course of the past year, I have dropped over 2k for logo's, contests, etc with little to no improvement on things :(

i make a few bucks a day on http://www.gowboards.com

Back in time i remeber i placed some ads at the top of and in the bottom of forumdisplay. I used colspan 5 to get the ad to span over all cells underneeth to get room for a big 728 size banner there. I went from 25USD to 60 USD a day by doing that. :) Its the best place on the entire board.

tats rocking earning man... i will be happy if i get aroung 50$ a month... my server charge is 15$ avg per month... :)

I have always wanted to know how to earn money from the website..

i have a website that have been running for almost 4 years now.
we have over 60k members and we have 2000 uniqe visits / day
but we don't do any kind of advertising actually never thought of doing so.

so how can someone revenue from such site ?

Can I take a look at your site? Interested in selling it?

I don't believe in ads. And thus is the reason I have made $0 a month. I am thinking if this continues, I might have to give up on my belife. I hate forums with ads, but hey, it keeps the forum itself going when members don't want to help support the site. Instead you drop nearly 500 bucks in 3 months to keep the forum up, and to try to get more people joining and involved. So yea... I am giving it another month, if I don't yeild around 50 bucks from donations, I will have no choice but to revert to ads.

sorry only just seen your post. The club i was doing the promotion work was sold, refurbed and took a whole new angle. They did not want to continue working with me despite my promotional emails and event organisation giving the club the 2 busiest nights it has ever had, pulling in over 7000 people over 2 weekends (Making me nearly 14k in the process) . I have started a new site not long ago and im currently working with 3 promoters to build this site up to what my previous one once was

What are the best ad programs to have? I would like to pull in around 40-50 a month with the ads. I am guessing Google AdSense?

I make zero. I don't run ads, I did try asking for donations but that did not bring in much of anything. I get about 150 uniques a day. Average 1000 posts per day.

I do have a web-site to go with the forum www.edtoons.com that I have Google Adsense on, but I only just started that.

BTW how do you make money running a forum, It seems almost impossible.

My Site is at http://www.edtoonsboard.com

Ads is the main source I would say. And then have a membership fee of a few bucks, and offer them something, along with removing of ads. As long as your forum has something to offer, so they will stay around, they will purchase that membership.

HabboDiscussion.com

Earns approx $60/monthly from google.

Earns approx $50/monthly from text ads

man what is wrong with my forum... 14K+ members, tons of traffic, been around for 7 years. i make nothing. i get $100 check from adsense about every 4 months. im losing money every month for YEARS. after reading this, heh, im even more depressed.
http://www.sacpaintball.com

Well the problem lies with most of your members arent active. If they arent active, your adsense isn't getting used much. You have less than 800 active, and I am not sure what you have the counted as active set for... Also the most users ever online was 121, So on average you get what... maybe 50 members on in a day? That is the only problem... you are a big site, but you don't have enough active members. Send out an e-mail to your inactive members and hopefully they will come back. I am sure you can get around 1k a month if most of those 14k were active.

I am just now starting to tinker with adsense and integrating it into my website. My forum is just featured around my local community. I started in august of '06 and at this time I have 483 members 250 or so that are active. I receive anywhere from 650 - 900 visitors a day with roughly 2500 uniques a month. Am I wasting my time with adsense or is the potential there?

Our forums are not "big boards" but earning around $550-$700 per month from two forums using google adsense.

Just switched the ads around on one of the forums see if that changes anything. :D

One board, around 50,000 impressions and 100 clicks per week, around $500 a month from adsense alone.

After paying for my expensive ded. server, I profit around $1k a month from adsense and vibrantmedia...my adsense hasn't been doing too good lately though :(

Anywhere from $5 - $70 dollars a day depending on how good my search engine placements are.

Usually I average about $10 - $20 a day.

But it's a smaller forum - around 2k members.

im losing also, but its worth it hehe

i earn 100USd perday from ads

lauxanh.us/diendan/

check it out

Ok, ok, ok... how can you enter to the www.big-boards.com ranking?
Want to beat #10 [Fok.nl] everybody say I can't but my Mom say I can :D

Im no were near a big board, but I has a phpbb for about a month. Made enough to get a Vbulletin and pay for hosting for 2 months. (Just asking members to buy premium status) Hopefully I can start it up again on my Vbulletin now. Good thing in my hosting is $12 a month, so not to much.

200,000 pages per day, 4000 uniques per day, and I make negative $440 bucks a month.

Stupid $440 buck server fees. :D

I get around 8000 landings from search engines each month.

Wonder how much I could make with ads? Not that I would do it, I'm just curious....

I'm a huge fan of an Ad-Free environment.

Great Thread!

Its amazing how much some of you guys are making from running a VB site.

How did you go about building up your members? What sort of marketing did you use and how long did it take before it got to the level where you have stats that sponsors might be interested in?

This has really got me thinking, but clearly there has to be some marketing investment in order to get people in. Why would people sign up to an empty site?

Intrigued as to what you all did.

Are you guys using Ad Units or Link Units? Or both, and how many of each?

I currently am using 1 Ad Unit for my header, image only. 2 Ad units, text only, inside the threads, and 1 Link Unit at the footer...

out of interest, to all of those who offer paid subscriptions to their members, what added features or incentives do you give them to donate? I imagine that this will depend on what market you're in, but surely there must be some generic options that can be offered?

I'm nowhere near a big board and have had Adsense for about a year and have yet to hit the $100 limit to release payment. I have two people subscribing at $10 per year, and that was only beacuse they were my mates who didnt mind throwing me a few $$. Recently i've been thinking of trying to pursue donations as opposed to adverts, but i need to be able to sell the idea to my members. So far the only things i can think of are offering e-mail addresses, viewing the forums ad-free and a monthly raffle to win back their subscription for the month once i ahve enough subscribers for that to be viable).

Any help on that would be greatly appreciated.

I tried donations in the beginning. And that was such a bust. Just a few buds of mine would donate, which wasn't nearly enough. So I added Adsense on April 3rd, and right now I am nearling $90. It is way better than donations. But... I do offer a membership, for a few bucks, you get a special colored name, and the ads are disabled. Also, you have your own section of the forum for the donators, and I usually put some special stuff in there, such as a certain account to a website, that costs a few bucks...
But yea, just donations, I would get nowhere at all... But most of the people on my site are younger viewers, usually around 15-16...

were not a big board, but were extremely nitch and topic specific, and we were the first forum on the topic of our kind at the time (now there are lots of copy cats). we have proprietary advertisers (ie, its not adsense or some other click through system, we actually go out in real life and hustle ad sales for banners). it took 2 years of hard work before we made any money at all. you can make a ton of money, you just have to get off you ass and get out there and hustle for it. its not going to fall in your lap just because you have a web site. its called WORK for a reason..

I use the donation method, $20 for life, for premium, then they get all types of special stuff. You just have to keep asking everyone, and sooner or later someone will say sure, why not. I would like to do ads, but I have no idea were to start when it comes to ads.

If I were you, I would do text and image ads. It gives you a larger database of advertisers...when you have more advertisers, there will be higher biddings...only the highest bids will be placed on your site...meaning you make more money.

I have 1 banner ad below the navbar and 2 inpost ads (first and last post). Right now, my inpost ads are rockin'. Yesterday they made $20+ while my banner only made $8.

Paid subscriptions is sort of like peer pressure...if you aren't getting any subscriptions...it's going to remain that way. You want to make your paid subscribers REALLY STAND OUT. For my site, I have a dark skin and have the premium usergroup color green and for their rank symbol, it's a really cool glowing green symbol I made that says PREMIUM (everyone loves em). What you need to do is give away free premium to good friends of yours to make it look like you are getting a lot of premium subscriptions...once you do that, people almost feel "pressured" into buying premium (just like peer pressure...you're not cool if you don't have premium).

What I offer in my premium is emails, "secret" tutorials that not too many people know how to do, EXTRA help (this is a big plus, whenever a premium member asks for help, THEY GET HELP), and a bunch of more junk and goodies (I have a projects forum telling those premium members what we have "in store" for the site and they can offer suggestions as to what they would like to see us do with the site...so it's more like they feel they have a say on what direction the site goes).

I hope that helps.

I don't like this technique...but if it works for you, good. I don't ask anyone to subscribe and I'm getting $300+ each month...the more premium members I get 1 month...the more I get the next month...like I stated earlier...it's like peer pressure...when a lot of people on the site are "green" with a "cool symbol" by their name, others feel the need to have that too so they don't feel left out. I find that much better than "asking" every person that registers to the site...that's rude IMHO.

Or the private forum that I can view as a guest.:D

not making a dime but i am spending lots of dimes to get the board running. i have adsense which isnt doing much for me the last 3 months.. we have aobut 150 users 1100 posts about 2 new users a day if we are lucky.. any ideas how to get more users and also post messages instead of just looking. i am using google adwords which doesnt seem to do anything but cost me alot of money.. any help would be appreciated

Sorry another question if i wanted to offer paid advertising (banners / links) how do you go about contacting companies who want to advertise. Do you just send them an email or what would you guys recommend ?

Well i get around 3500 unique visitors / day and i am earning about $80 / month through my Adsense! :)

Ah I get around 8,000 impressions a day and make around 35 cents a day if i'm lucky.

bygforum.com & thegowforums.com combined.

Here is my roughly average for the month of April per day.
1000 impressions
20 ads clicked
$4.25 daily

Still very small site. Roughly 100 active members, a little over 200 in total.

$0.

But I have gotten about ~$300 in donations in the past 3 months. I also don't force ads and never will because I am strong against forcing ads upon the user.

Right now, I am donation supported only. I have just over 4200 members and get about $600-700/month. I've no idea what number of unique visitors I get or any other statistic as I rarely even think about that stuff. We average about 10-15 new members per day.

The site is four years old. It started off slow and then eventually began to pick up speed. The first few years, myself and a few others spent a lot of effort promoting the site directly to other motorcycle riders we'd meet at other events or while out riding. We visited several bike shows and handed out small business cards. Once that took hold, other people started spreading the word for us.

The key to getting people to donate is two fold, service and community.

You either have to have a LOT of one of those or a good mix of the two. My site focuses heavily on the community aspect as the service side is merely providing a place where folks can get together to plan rides, trips, and other events. It is a place where they can ask questions and get good help from the other members.

The community aspect is most important to me. My site is about motorcycling, specifically Texans that ride. My number one rule is that ALL members must be courteous and respectful towards ALL other members at ALL times, no exceptions. I laid down that rule early on and I have enforced it. The VAST majority of the people that donate to my site have included a reference to that rule as the reason for them supporting my site. If folks get beat over the head by other members and the environment is hostile, why would anyone want to keep coming back, much less send you money? Enforcing the rule of respect has helped tremendously in fostering a sense of community among our users.

I do differentiate between regular users and forum supporters. There is a private forum section that only supporters can see. Here I solicit feedback and ideas. As was mentioned by someone else, this lets the supporters feel like they have some say in the vision of my site. Best of all, I really do get some fantastic feedback and suggestions! The other things I do are stuff like more PM's for registered users, use of the VB Photogallery during the supporter term, a label under the username to show that the person is a supporter, and not much else. Most of the folks are not donating for that kind of stuff, they do it out of loyalty for the site and a recognition of the time and effort that goes into the site behind the scenes.

I have things set up so that people can make one time donations or yearly donations. I do not have lifetime donations. When people donate, they get a 30 day supporter status. After that 30 days expires, so to does their supporter status and all extra perks. I have a great many people that routinely do the once a month donation. I also have a great many that have paid for one year. Lastly, I allow for people to set up automatically recurring subscriptions to make their supporter status last indefinitely. I do not make all registered users donate. This may be appropriate in some cases, but not for my site.

The key is to work the numbers. My minimum donation amount is $5/month. For most folks, that is a coffee or two at Starbucks. When other members have pointed that out to them, most see it as quite reasonable to donate a mere $5 to a site they enjoy so much. Some have actually been QUITE generous with large one time donations. However, if I could get only 1000 of my slightly more than 4000 users to donate $5/mo, I would be doing this as my regular job!

I too have long been against any form of advertising. However, the reality is that the bills have to be paid and the effort it takes to keep up a decent site is not minimal! I have approached my supporting members on this topic and they are all okay with me adding some advertising and that they would not necessarily stop donating. One option is to let the supporters opt out of the advertising. Although, most of my supporters said they would not do this even if it were an option. What is key to them is that the advertising be related to things they might actually be interested in knowing about: local bike shops, local events, places to stay on trips, etc,... For this reason, I will not be using something like Google AdSense. It will take more legwork, but I will directly solicit advertising from specific companies.