Are forums Viable?

[Uncle Gizmo]

I see alot of these forums springing up every where. My questions:

Do they Make Money?

If not who funds them?

If not, WHY?

If not, how could you make money?



If they do, how much....

 

[NK2000]

no they dont get money, they maybe receive some donation. They pay everything by themselves, but so they also get the right go kick your , if they dislike your behavior or just your avatar
To make money you normally need advertisment, but advertising is a good reason for some people not to visit some pages. Maybe they know some good hoster and get it for free (space and traffic) or they place it at some host which has a lot of traffic and it doesnt matter if they run it from there, but normally they pay a webhost, but still dont get respect from their visitors, because they dont know how hard it can be to run such a site, this is a great place to say thanks to the Extreme .NET Forums Team, great work! I ran some own development/support forums a while ago, but different topic and i learned to appreciate what people like you do..

 

[NK2000]

btw dont forget "money isnt just everything"

 

[quwiltw]

Originally posted by NK2000
no they dont get money, they maybe receive some donation. They pay everything by themselves...

While this was probably the case for this particular site several months ago, my guess is that it is not true now. It is now owned by a business which traditionally dont make such acquisitions without the potential to make a profit (the exception being those that do so for tax reasons). Since their isnt a lot of advertising here, I cant think of *how* their making that profit but Im sure it exists or will soon.

 

[NK2000]

hm sounds like they are selling information about users just kidding

so also this will be commercial..
can you give me information about how much traffic you got each month?


but you still dont earn anything, so still non-profit from the staff members view

 

[Robby]

some stats:
http://www.nedstatbasic.net/s?tab=1&link=1&id=1982121

 

[NK2000]

so you edited your onlineuser counter?

14 members and 134 guests on the boards

if that is true then there must be more than 256 views for today..

 

[Bucky]

The Nedstat counter is only for the main page. Many guests are
linked directly to posts through search engines, and many users
also go directly to forums without visiting the main page often.

 

[samsmithnz]

theres a main page?

 

[Derek Stone]

That counter is grossly inaccurate. Its hardly worth mentioning.

 

[samsmithnz]

Are any counters accurate?

 

[irasmith]

Originally posted by Uncle Gizmo
I see alot of these forums springing up every where. My questions:

Do they Make Money?

If not who funds them?

If not, WHY?

If not, how could you make money?



If they do, how much....

I can only speak from personal experience here so I do hope you find it of help.

I have not seen any forums such as this for which you must pay to be a member, read, or make postings. So I really dont know how good of a money maker a forum in and of itself would be.

Perhaps there are a lot of others out there who are willing to share, devote time to answer questions, and otherwise help spread the good word about whatever it is the forum focuses in on. While it is true that I myself tend to ask more questions in this set of forums than answer that is only because I am new to the subject matter of .NET and am using the advise and wisdom of those who are more experienced to help me learn as I progress. Other forums where I am more up to speed on the subject matter, there you will find me answering more questions than I ask, so I do give back once I have mastered what I am trying to learn.

I have seen forums used for the most part to provide discussion and support areas. Most of the time the forums I have seen and used are provided by a developer who has released a module. I am into Post Nuke cms system pretty heavy, have my own website running Post Nuke. Many of the module developers have forums as a part of their site so users of the module can post bugs, get advice, share tips and tricks of doing neat and unusual things with the module, and so on. I have just started to get into the forums for Dot Net Nuke and Rainbow, two popular cms packages one done in vb.net the other c#.net.

My personal view is that forums in and of themselves may not make you a lot of money. As ad addition to your site to supplemnt or enhance your site and provide a way for users to communicate with you about a product or service you are offering, they do wonderfully in my view.

The cost of the forum will vary depending if you are using an open source package or a commercial one. Also, depending on the environment the forum needs to run it your cost will vary. If you have an open source forum that uses Linux, PHP, MySQL, and Apache the cost is very minimal indeed since all of those items are open source products. If you go with a hosting service then you can get some pretty good deals on disk space/bandwidth setups.

Hope this helps you out.

 

[quahog]

Another way they can make money is through referals. It is a form of advertising but it is more subtle. As you can often jump to a site by clicking on the advertisement graphic, you can do so through the hypertext link. If the hypertext link passes a parameter to the destination URL, it can indicate the account of the referring website.

For example the site that Robby mentioned has a many links on the Catalogue page. Many of them link to homepages while others are linked to corporate sites. Many corporate sites will pay a referal fee if someone buys a product from their site if the customer came from one of their referal sites. The hypertext link passes a parameter to the destination website indicating the originating URL. A company that specializes in this is www.linkshare.com

By the way, I did not mean to indicate that the site Robby mentioned was using link referals. I was just using it as an example.