How do you guys make money??
 

Ok, i know for some of u guys, u dont advertise or anything.
But for the people that do make money(for hosting and stuff), what do u use??
banners?? or what??

any suggestion?? :D

I sell banner ads on my forums. It's good for both the advertisers and the users, since they help each other out. Right now I've been charging $20/month for a banner, which I think is a bit low, and will probably go up in the future.

I make most of my money from the Service Requests forum. Probably made about $200 in total

Futureal - How did u get ur advertiser?? i need to get some so i can pay for the hosting and stuff -_- Site is growing too fast =/

Assasingod - Service Requests......like what kinda services?

<a href="https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=30" target="_blank">https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=30</a>
I use that

cool.........thx assassingod (did u know that ur name have 2 'ass' in it?? lol)
just playin tho ^^

Yes, yes I do :rolleyes:

lol...........but it's all good tho
unless u're me, no one would noticed it..........til they read this thread :P

Ugh, losing brain cells. Must get back on topic.

I don't make money with any of my sites, but I plan to soon for a new service of mine.

Aside from the internet, I have a part-time job as a "network support assistant" for my college. Easy pay.

I make money from the money tree:)

Satan

We have such in Northern California. They're called marijuana labs. :speechless:

cool.........1 more reason why i should move to cali, to take over the money tree ;)

In all honesty, the advertisers started approaching me. There are now at least five or six retail stores that have literally grown out of nothing because of the traffic they receive from my forums.

If you mean out of the forums, my private forums accept donations.

how much do u make w/ donations??

well... i dont really want my members (kids ^_^) to spend money or nething so i'ma get a banner up so i can get some money for the hosting and stuff :)

I make my money via www.designdevise.com :)

nice excuse for advertising your site, eh? ;)

And I make my money from helping people (vborg advertising forum etc)

I'll keep the actual amount private, but it's a few hundred or so a month. So my site is essentially ad-free and sponsor-free.

That's pretty good. I had trouble maintaining any sort of reasonable donation revenue so I had to go to advertising banners. I still get donations from time to time but they are quite infrequent. Many people donated a lot in the beginning, but it is hard to get repeat donations from people. :)

yeah.......i might ask ppl to donate......would be a lot easier ^_^

what do u say tho?? o_O

You give Site Supporters a lot more perks. For me, I give them unlimited smilies, unlimited post length, no time limits between posts, increased PM space etc. etc. :)

Nice idea;)

Satan

Like Erwin, I take contributions from users... Most of them send in a few dollars a month... Perks included custom and bigger sized avatars each time they contribute, access to secret forums and an email forwarder. :p So they're sorta inclined to donate.

I make money by dancing at strip clubs :D

And you will make twice as much as now every member of vB.org will go to see you:p

Satan

I never thought of that :rolleyes:

I make money from having a job....

*cough*

I make the board private & make a donation mandator for access. So as not to have someone donate a penny , I make the minimum amount necessary for access $25. .. with amounts from there ranging up to $100 . Most people only pay the minimum, but certainly a handfull pay more, including the $100 option, every month.
I use PayPal & and online charge card service to process the payments.

I allow banner ads on my website, & have a few. But they don't really bring in much . (A couple hundred a month tops?) I don't allow them on the message board though, because I figure if they're paying for access, why have it slowed down with ads. My board currently brings in around $1500.-$2500 a week, and has been doing so for about a year now. (Yes, it really brings in that much. Never does less than $1K in a week and most often does over $2K a week.)

Now .. that's damn good money from a msg. board. The 'secret' is making a GOOD board .. well monitored & regulated .. full of good info. (Not full of BS & fights, which are the way of so many public/open message boards.) Make it FREE .. and leave it that way for a good while. When your board is popular enough from it's quality content and good structured management, then start charging. Happy existing members will have no problem paying .. and because your board is good, new users won't either & will be satisfied with their purchase once they get access & see the quality of your board. Works for me !!

Give it a try .. Sure beats going to work !! :-)

Copper, that only works on boards that have a topic that draws a targetted audience that is 18+ years old. On the whole, anyway.

May I ask you, how many members do you have on the site?

i plan to introduce a subscription service to my site which will do mostly all of what erwin said and a little more, also with a few plans i got, store points will be worth alot more, so you'll be able to buy them via paypal

but that's all a little while off, so right now i make nothing :(

you should go make my request, i would love to give you my money ;)

Can you give me your money for nothing?:):p

Satan

There are some forums out there where a subscription service could bring in loads of money.

Any administer who owns a forum that has more than 20,000 members, with a good percentage of those being active users, could benefit from a subscription service.

Such as sitepointforums.com. It's such a phenomenally resourceful site that, even if they started charging $5/month to use the site, I'd probably still give in. Although their reputation overall would go down some. (any site with a subscription service will initially go down in reputation, because they automatically become bias to those with money)

With any large forum comes people who are addicted posting, as a hobby to their social life. The problem of subscription services only comes in with competition, because if another forum of equal size and interest exists, people might migrate in swarms.

If you ever need to set up a subscription service, slip a message my way, because I have experience with Paypal IPN, etc. :p

with subscription, the secret is to set it up so that the members who don't pay want to but still like they aint missing out on anything, i.e. stay away from special forums and what not.

for nothing https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2003/10/3.gif nope, but for making my request https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2003/10/4.gif

Absolutely right. It certainly wouldn't work on a generic 'town square / anything goes' message board. You have to have a targeted topic/audience.
I currently have just over 7200 members on my board.

I'll partially agree with 'Velocd'. He wrote : " .. any site with a subscription service will initially go down in reputation, because they automatically become bias to those with money ."

I didn't have a reputation drop as such when I started charging for access. If anything, people seemed rather happy to pay. However, I did get (and still do get on a rare occasion) a few people emailing me to vent their anger over not being allowed free access any longer. (As if I 'owed' them free access since they had it before.) I'll reply to those emails in as nice a way as possibly & just tell them 'hey .. the message board software wasn't free. Maintaining it isn't free. Bandwidth isn't free. domain names aren't free. etc.. I don't feel bad asking for a little back after giving it away for free for so long.
Reputation wise though .. if you have a good board the reputation will likely stay good even after charging for access. I've never been to sitepointforums.com (mentioned in a previous post here) , but if they have over 20K members, they're doing something right. No way at least half or more wouldn't pay to keep their access. Sounds like there's a LOT of $$ waiting to be made there.

Sitepointforums will never charge, only because they make money through many other methods (such as advertising, and their books/scripts).

It's immensely resourceful, and many professionals post there.. so yeah, a measely $5/month for most registrants would be nothing.

Indeed, a site with no reputation (a starting site) could go well with starting on a subscription service.

I may even decide to convert when I get my new style up, and switch to vB3 RC.

I'm planning on implementing some form of making use of vB3's subscriptions system, to do something similar to what Erwin is doing - giving additional services to the people that pay.

Anyone have any tips on how I could best do this? I'm open to all ideas :)

I currently have a bit of a too young crowd, for the most of it, but I intend to draw on a more professionalistic crowd with the release of my new edition of the site (which will be running vB3, unlike I am now on my live site). I'm aiming for Graphics Artists, Writers and Programmers/Webdevelopers. I reckon a fair few of them have cash, no? ;)

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing your work!