Generating Revenue
 

I have been running my site for almost 2 years now and it has grown a lot. I am up to 9,977 members as of right now. However, I cannot seem to make money off of the site, or get advertisers. I have tried various CPM networks with not much success. Currently I am using CJ and YPM and making some, but not much. I have tried taking donations but I have very few at the moment. Also, I have tried having merch made, which did ok. I am about even with that with still some more to sell. Maybe it is just unrealistic for me to make money. So, either I am not big enough, or I am doing something wrong. It is a snowboarding community website. Anyway, I posted my stats below from the past 2 months. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

June Stats
Total Sessions 62,331.00
Total Pageviews 1,435,734.00
Total Hits 4,485,734.00
Total Bytes Transferred 22.04 GB

July Stats
Total Sessions 60,149.00
Total Pageviews 2,149,547.00
Total Hits 6,191,176.00
Total Bytes Transferred 29.89 GB

Just my opinion, but most people right now are hurting for money........Not saying anything bad about people, but with the cost of utilities, the cost of gasoline, the cost of interest rate's, etc.......Most people can't really afford to donate to a site.
Not sure about snowboard vendor's though, they too may be hurting do to the economy.

hotwheels

yeah, I do suppose that is a possibility. It hurts me when it costs me $50 bux just to fill my tank!

Oh yea.............I currently own 8 vehicle's and i have had to start limiting severly, what i drive.

Have you tried putting together a formal media kit and selling your site at an extreme sports/ winter sports/ snowboarding tradeshow? What response do you get contacting the major industry companies directly? Do competing communities have major advertisers in the niche?

Looked at your site and you have
Threads: 5,333, Posts: 111,610, Members: 9,980, Active Members: 2,439 Average Age: 20.94

Very low thread count and posts for the amount of members... Im asumbing that your site has little posting traffic and sponsors usually want to see actual member activity rather then hi member count.

For example my site had
Threads: 27,578, Posts: 233,701, with only 3,579 Members

You can see that my member count is a bot low but it is a very busy site. Sponsor love that. They key is not only members but TRAFFIC TRAFFIC

Well, I'd suggest adding a premium membership, or something of the sort. YOu very dedicated members will definetly consider purchasing it if you give them enough benefits. I would suggest trying to add in more than just snowboarding to your site. You'll probably generate more hits and stuff. Add more community dicussions, more interactive stuff, more things to get your website fans getting more involved in the community. Have you gotten your forum reviewed though? You should probably try it if you haven't, or if you have, try more than just one place.

January 2006 7379
February 2006 8968
March 2006 9427
April 2006 6703
May 2006 4247
June 2006 7796
July 2006 13094

Posting has picked up a bit. Any suggestions on getting it to pick up even more? I also assume that since the site is young, just about 2 years old.

i have to agree there. my site only has about 500 members w/ 470 being active within the last 30 days, but we have over 20k threads and well over 100k posts (including archives). we've slowed down to a recent host move, but are pretty active. we used to have over 10k members, but pruned everyone that stopped showing up. total member count is pointless if your board is dead.