Selling advertising space on forums

[RantyDave]

Yeah, I know how this looks - new member, only one post ... but bear with me. Everybody has to start somewhere.

I've been interested, for quite a while now, in building a company that specialises in working with forum administrators to sell advertising on their sites. In essence the idea is to have a shared infrastructure ... a supported mod, provisioning/payment infrastructure, and most importantly a shared marketing effort and general economies of scale to get companies to actually advertise. It's a pretty common model in the blogosphere and they have companies such as BlogAds, arguably Federated Media and even the really blatant astroturfing companies like Review Me making it such that midsize blogs and upwards to make a return to their authors. Why not do the same for forums?

To date I've been doing some homework. Answering questions like: are there enough forums (yes); do they get enough hits (yes); is it technically possible (yes); and do administrators sit on vbulletin.org asking each other how to make enough money to cover their hosting costs (apparently so). I've had a word with one or two media buyers who seem interested and the "people who finance startups" are keen once they can see some traction ... and who can blame them. It's on this last point that the decision has finally been taken that I should stop mucking about and just get on with it, so I have.

So, Hi, this is what I'm up to. Would really appreciate some feedback though since the company absolutely relies on the idea that administrators would like to make a buck or two, and I'm fortunately sufficiently ego-free to know that there's a whole shedload of stuff that I just don't know and haven't thought of. Please let me know what it is.

Cheers,
Dave

(davep @ atomicdroplet dot com)