Forums Being Bought for $$$$$$, but how do they make money?

I got a quesiton. How do people make money off of forums? I seen forums, that go for like 20k. These forums usually have like 500-1000 members logging in everyday. Probably 5k+ visitors per day and over 500k posts.

So why do people buy forums so high, when it's pretty hard to make money from something like adsense off of forums.

[HybridIllusions]

Usually because of the ad revenue. If you look at those saling listings, they usually detail daily unique, member activity, and ad revenue. It isn't uncommon for a forum to make over $1,000 in ad revenue, monthly. A great board can make enough to make you drop your day job.

It's all about the ads, and people sell the boards when they don't want ot manage them anymore, thus others buy it to make long-time revenue, promote their products/services, and sell for higher as time goes by.

Also, it isn't easy to make revenue off of adsense, you've got to know how not to annoy your visitors and members but still have the ads be noticeable.

[Ted S]

When you have a mid or large sized site making ad revenue tends to be fairly straight forward. Depending on the demographic, the value of the visitors and the sales/ marketing ability of the owner(s) forums can bring in substantial CPMs and with their high traffic there tends to be a lot of opportunity for return. Companies often acquire forums at a mid-sized stage before they're really hit their peak earnings in order to make a substantial profit by bringing them into an established private ad network where they can drive rates up quickly.

AdSense can also be quite profitable when put in the right context.

[COBRAws]

You just need to be clever enough to sell your audience to good advertisers.

[woodysfj40]

Done correctly, and with appropriate traffic and content, a forum/site can bring in thousands a month in revenue...the companies that purchase forums tend to get higher returns on their ads due to the overall volume they generate each month, plus they are running multiple forums on their servers, allowing for economies of scale.

[wickland]

There are forums out there that bring in $7000+ per DAY in Adsense revenue. Think I'm lying, check out shoemoney.com and read about his Adsense Check $133k/mo. That was done generally on a forum.

[azn_romeo_4u]

that guy has an ego problem. I was reading his blog about bigfish.com and he was getting pissed cuz one guy was making more money than him.

[wickland]

lol, bigfish.com goes to microsoft. I think bill gates is that guy that is making more money than him (jk). I didn't see that post on his blog, I'll have to find it.

[SVTCobraLTD]

I never really understood all this adsense stuff. Who pays you? Do you get paid per click? Per purchase or what?

SVT

[Analogpoint]

Originally Posted by wickland

There are forums out there that bring in $7000+ per DAY in Adsense revenue. Think I'm lying, check out shoemoney.com and read about his Adsense Check $133k/mo. That was done generally on a forum.

Jeremy make his 100k+ Adsense check on this site: http://www.nextpimp.com/

Originally Posted by SVTCobraLTD

I never really understood all this adsense stuff. Who pays you? Do you get paid per click? Per purchase or what?

SVT

Adsense was purly PPC (pay per click), but has recently gotten into some affilliate stuff where it's pay per action (purchase, lead etc). Advertisers pay Google, and Google pays you.