How much do you earn on your big board?

Hey guys!
Just out of curiosity i was wondering how mutch you make on your big boards?

Type in forumname, rank on Big-Boards and how mutch you make.

No need to say how you make it.

:banana:

[Ranma2k]

I'm not earning I'm losing $500 a month
and i have 2500 unique visits a day

never thought about adding ads to the site since members doesn't like it

[Darmak]

I earn about 800 dlls / Month whit average of 12000 uniques per day

[reebosak]

I am currently losing money too. I've spend a couple thousand dollars easily over the past 3 years or so of my forums, only recently have i actually started to try and earn some of that back in ads and donations.

after YPN money and donations are figured in, i'm still probably losing around $140 a month on average for this year. hopefully that will change soon

[Ahsin1]

i earn like 2xxx$

[Lazorfist]

Make no $. T__T

I especially liked the "**GUEST ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE ANY THREAD TILL THEY ARE NOT A REGISTERED USER**"

A large number of the members on my board lurked for a while first, so I bet that probably isn't good for activity in the long run.

[FlyBoy73]

Very rarely will any forum owner not go into the hole (some times very deep) while starting their forum. I got into around $8k in debt (hosting) before my main forum finally started covering the hosting costs.

Rare is the situation where you do this as a living or even profit from the git-go. I've said this before, but you gotta love it.. Most of the people with Big-Boards today did not start out with money in mind and they busted their asses to build the community. That was early in the forum "game" and now I would image it would be even harder since most topics are covered and the leaders have emerged in each niche for the most part.

[Wifey]

Losing!

I don't run ads on my site though. I qualify, but I can't bring myself to put them on my site. It would be nice though. I have over 12,000 members but not that many are active, LOL. I prune sporadically though, so it's all good

I'd like to just break even a month. My hosting is great -- I host most images on fotki as well so that helps with bandwidth, but it's still around $50 a month. I'm praying I don't have to go over that because then I'll consider closing it. It's not as "grand" as most of the other big boards on here!

[Scrolls]

I am co-owner of a new board that we just created a few months ago (right now, we are in the hole around $1000, but this is our first VB, and I think we are working backwards lol) We started the site before adding all the content that we really needed I.E. The personalized skin/theme, organizing each forum, etc. so now we are working on the site as 50+ members navigate it and post lmao (but at least its only 50 for now)

FlyBoy-You say leaders of each topic niche is pretty much covered, and this is very true, ALTHOUGH, competition can be swift in the coming. Think search engines who was number one before Google seemingly came out of nowhere? Everyone has a chance to become the number one of thier chosen topic, it just takes alot of time, effort, luck, and a damned good marketing ploy! lol

[The Chief]

I can say I am making more then what I am losing, mostly because of my other sites, but I am not even offering subscriptions yet

[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by Scrolls

FlyBoy-You say leaders of each topic niche is pretty much covered, and this is very true, ALTHOUGH, competition can be swift in the coming. Think search engines who was number one before Google seemingly came out of nowhere? Everyone has a chance to become the number one of thier chosen topic, it just takes alot of time, effort, luck, and a damned good marketing ploy! lol

Oh, you are right about the "competition" or new arrivals in the same niche, but to overcome an established community that has a lot of momentum already built up is a very hard thing to do even if the new forum actually does things better.

A few years back I started up a community covering jetski racing since I was pretty heavily involved in that. My graphics / skins were tops.. I had the best software (vBulletin) with lots of features, galleries and much more, whereas the community that had been around for about a year and a half longer when I started was running a basic phpbb and had no graphics and very few features. As hard as I worked it was a huge uphill battle to get people to do more than register and check it out. We had a number of solid members but most just were not going to move. To be honest though, it was not my primary community and after about a year I got disillusioned with it. If I had kept up 110% it very well could be the premier community now since the guy I was competing against pretty much let it go. I could have also thrown more money at it, etc... etc.. So, yes, it can be done, but it is hard as heck.

With regards to search engines, they constantly flux, but the community with the most threads/posts usually have the most links/references in all the major search engines. My Big Board's links pretty much come up near the top for any thing you can think of in my niche. The only way for that to happen is to have a ton of unique content and time. If there was a new forum on the block it would cost them a fortune in adwords (etc) to get noticed. That, fortunately, is not going to happen in my niche since it isn't a big money market.

Again, it all comes down to lots of hard work. Nothing is impossible.