Is there any money to be made in starting a forum?

[AlexLefty]

For example, a vBulletin forum like SS.
Consider a forum like SS with 100,000 members, one with 50,000, and one with significantly less.

Any thoughts?

 

[PrettyBoyAJ]

Of course.

Google Adsense.

All these ads on the site = revenue

 

[taiyuu_otoko]

Figure if you set up a forum, you'd get about one percent of your daily traffic clicking on those ads. One out of a hundred.

And figure that each click would get you fifty cents.

That means, in order to make $150 a day, you'd need 300 clicks.

Which means you'd need 30,000 daily visitors.

So yes, it's possible. Just set up a forum, and figure out a way to get 30,000 folks to come and visit every day.

That's just shy of 11 million per year.

No problem.

 

[goundra]

6-7 years ago, without even trying, I got 5000 unique visits a day, just a chat forum about guns and survivalism. I didn't even go around to other forums boosting it, after the initial go around of 30 or so forums. there's 300 such forums today. Just google for those topics if you don't believe me. the end of the world Mayan calender 2012 thing, I guess.

 

[AlexLefty]

Of course.

Google Adsense.

All these ads on the site = revenue

Obviously. But i think it's more like tayouu said, you need a lot of traffic to even be able to make some pocket change. Because first you have to recover the website hosting costs, and the initial purchase of vbulletin

 

[Marvin Gaye]

Ultimately, I believe yes and only yes if your forum exists to fill a need

Your forum will probably only get huge if it exists to solve a problem

Also consider its about $200 to maintain it monthly....I hope I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air, but yeah...

So yeah go for it after doing some good research!! I hope you don't start a forum about knitting or something though