I run two forums that bring in about $180/mo in adsense and roughly $50/mo with Adbrite. Music related and real estate related. 4,100 members on the Music site and about 2,000 members on the real estate site.

Always trying to get more members ;)


Tourmeister that is quite impressive. My forum has roughly the same stats as your.s. members, sign ups per day, unique hits per day.. and you kill me on advertising money. Whats your secret?

i thought this was the big boards forum? lol

IMO, if you're not GROSSING at LEAST $1000 a month, you aren't a big board, or you're doing something wrong (or not advertising)

Amusingly, there's no actual criteria for 'What Makes a Big Board' as far as this Forum is concerned. ;)

I think common sense would point that "50 members" or "100 uniques a day" does not consist of a big board.

but what do i know...

Strange, I thought Big Boards discussion would have people talking about how they reached 20k+ members etc..

I run 2 forums one has 31,000 members the other has 42,000 members

the first makes around $1,000 - $2,000 a month the other $3,000 - $4,000 a month

any board with 5,000+ members should be making atleast $500+ a month.

Would you mind sharing us how you managed to obtain that many members? Thanks

I cant understand adsense. Those annoying little text adds that display on sites. I cant believe people actually click them.

Seriously, its one of the mysteries of the world,

I don't think adsense is annoying at all. If integrated well, they will show relevant advertising for the topic/site, which will result in a higher CTR.

My boards far from big, but I make about $0.11 per day from Adsense. :erm:

I started in 2 months ago and have 80 active users and 125 members.
Working on trying to generate more users.

The organization I work with, has just installed forums not long ago. Over 100,000 hits, and adfree. Though the board just ruled to have ads. The only hole in the finances was paying for vBulletin. The server was donated. It's the only thing ever donated to the organization. Money is not accepted, we usually tell them to keep it.

I'd like to see some of these forums, I've noticed alot of you haven't included your urls

15k users, most spam posts removed and users purged when inactive.

people still come in but the money from adsense is low

anyone tip for a company with banner ads perhaps ?

maybe that would make them click more :P

I have almost 11k users and I purge users and we dont make near that much, we get donations and some subscriptions but with adsense I thnk google makes most of that money cause its crap. How do you make so much?

<a href="http://forum.ih8mud.com" target="_blank">http://forum.ih8mud.com</a>

first step to any successful forum of your own is to spend lots of time studying the successes and failures of other sites....quietly keeping a pulse on other's traffic will provide you with the tools to properly make your own site successful. Despite the continued growth of mine, I still actively track a dozen other large forums to understand what they are or aren't doing to grow.

The other key is to have a site that is an extension of a passion you already have...my site began as an extension of my own passion for offroading, and I continue to participate actively both online AND thru my attendance at events....amazing how well passing out free coffee mugs and stickers and koozies can work for brand recognition.

I'm hard pressed to keep my weekly time below 40 hours...fortunately, my present job (professional offroad driver) allows me sufficient downtime to keep up.

From a $$ standpoint, my 2006 business taxes ran over $10,000...including penalties....uugh

i have 8000 uniques a day, and i used to make something like 9$$ dollars a month... but now i only make 0$.

I have 22000 members 2200 unique a day making 5$ a day so far with AdSense. no other source of income (by the way the AdSense is not on my forum its on other site that I linked with a banner images in my forum.

because we know adding AdSense in the forum is risky!! :(

I make $5K-$10K a month, depending on how many sponsors are renewing their advertising with me. I do poorly on Adsense for some reason, most I have made with Adsense is $1500.

Site has over 25,000 registered members.

- 10k uniques a day / 80k pageviews
I make around $35 a day from popups on my mainpage (not forum) and around $10 a day from adbrite/admedian cpm banners. I hope i can do something with subscriptions in the upcomming months cause I dont like popups at all :( My stats:
Threads: 2,755, Posts: 39,658, Members: 47,539, Active Members: 11,706 and around 200-500 registrations per day. (Running on a dedicated server from softlayer, $190/month)

You would do better with some better placements. I see you did improve it by removing that annoying "please register" overlay you had on there. I am a member on your site and even with the "remember me" feature it would popover.

Better placements will improve your adsense. I changed one of my sites and went from 4k/ 5k a month to 11k/12k a month on one of my sites.

Your articles need better ad integration. It will pay out much better. If you have any questions dont hesitate to PM me. I check in here every other day.

losing

Another suggestion - try AuctionAds.

I have found this to be very lucritive on my forums. It out performs adsense for me. (and I do ok with Adsense)

I've tried auctionads all this month and made 10 bucks...before I tried it...I'd wake up every morning and already have 10 bucks sitting in my adsense. I know it takes time to get autction ads going but it really depends on your site as to whether you can run those and do well. People come to my site b/c they already have everything and they want to learn how to use it...so yeah...

Then it sounds like you might want to change your keywords around. I wrote an aticle about My tips for AuctionAds. Maybe that will help you out.

How do you do so well to get so many members?

Is that search engines that bring in all these uniques? or is it just the word has been spread widely?

Im not sure if this was meant for me. But its a combination of things. Search engines play a big part of it, but so does promotion and word of mouth.

don't you get a ton of your members from adwords ? seems every phrase I search has a vbfaq ad on it :)) google, msn, ask, alexa...lol


I tried auction ad's. I've made 1$ :D
I do have a few referrals, but I think it's because I run a webmaster site. I make Much more with adsense and so do most my members. Have you tried AuctionAds ?

I think it's a great program for niche sites. I've left a small ad on one page, but I wont add much more.

I've started working with cj.com and have done well with it.
I make on average, $40 a day with all my sites.

I think that most forum owners with that many users would love to know ourselves exactly what the 'perfect storm' was to make our forums so successful, so we could replicate it over and over! :)

We trialled Auction Ads in our footer (which only made about $30 a month on adsense) and it made us almost $120 the first month, great we thought. However, that soon dropped each month since - until this month - we barely had $4 in the first 10 days.

Well on my small board
i make $200 per month some time it goes 250$
& minimum it goes to $170 till now..

I make nothing. I get about a thousand posts a day. I have adsense ads but so far, ive had it for a week and 21 clicks have gotten me 2 dollars :\

I make about $15 a month on my forum that has about 2,000 posts. These are not google ads or anything, mostly sponsorship and subscription purchases.

That is exactly my experience.
3 Google ads, one at the top, two below the first post and out of over 20 thousand pageviews and over 1000 posts a day I get maybe (on a good day) 5-6 clicks, which makes me (on a good day) one dollar. I never made more than 30$ a month from this particular forum.

I tried everything already, different sizes, colors, placement and styles of ads and nothing seems to work, people simply ignore google ads on my forum.

Then I tried auction ads, people clicked them, but no one ever bought anything. After a week and not a single cent I turned it off.

So, ok, it took me a long time, but now, after well over two years, I realized there is no profit running a forum and I am running it just for fun, while paying all the expenses from my own packet.

I do not even want to think about monetizing it anymore.

^Yeah pretty much, We need some way to get the profits rolling in.

I have about 10K unique visits every day and more than 300K users every month. 1.5 million of page webs and i only have adsense in my forums.

I have 12000 registered users and 180000 posts.

What could be my earnings with this statics?. What do you think?. ( Only to know if i'm doing it bad or good).

Depends what is your forum about, but I would guess, you get somewhere between 5-10 dollars a day, if you're as unlucky as I am :)

--------------- Added at 10:49 ---------------

Btw. it's weird that you have 12 thousand reg.users and only 180k posts. I have only 3 thousand users, but 250k posts. It looks like you should give your members more incentive to post.

I don't have a big forum, but I make tons less on my forum than with websites. Me personally, I never click on forums with ads because the content I'm looking for is in the forum or I hit the back button. Other than that, it just all depends on what you do.

I think i have active about 3k or 4k members. 10 dollars / day is good ?

Sounds good average territory. With 3 sites I run getting only 200 hits a day combined brings me in 10 bucks a day. Click thru % is 7.39

I wrote a mod for pixel advertising, similar to http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ for a guy about a year ago who reports about $100,000 annually in pixel ad revenue. I mean, they ARE attractive and mesmerising to the end-user. I find myself looking closely at the ads on that site from time to time .

Man! everybody scares me... I doing my boards to get rich! :D