…continued from Part 1.

So with more than 300,000 unique visitors and well over 5 million pageviews a month, am I making serious money with my forum? Sadly, the answer is “No”.

There are Google Adsense plugins for virtually every popular forum software to creatively place the ads for a higher CTR, e.g. you could automatically insert a 300×250 ad unit after every third post. Unfortunately, that’s a luxury reserved only for established forums because some people are turned-off by having too many ads. Being a young forum, I had to be extra careful not to be perceived as being “money-faced”, as the Chinese call it.

Fortunately, my forum members understand that we still need money for server bills, contest prizes, occasional design updates and forum software licenses. I tried keeping ads to the minimum and we only have these on the forum:
1) a rotating 728×90 banner ad at the top.
2) Kontera in-line ads (only displays to guests).
3) $10 annual subscriptions a.k.a. donations.

I’ve yet to actively sell the banner space and so far, have only shown Amazon affiliate ads and mostly creatives of my other websites. There are 2 problems with banner ads on a forum:
a) it’s difficult to sell if you have a really diverse visitor traffic.
b) CTR is low on busy forums, i.e. 0.2% to 0.5% is normal.

Luckily, 75% of my traffic is from the U.S. and 91% if including Canada, Europe, U.K. and Australia - quality traffic that makes it more compelling for potential advertisers. FYI, I’m using the execellent and free OpenAds (previously phpAds) script for managing my banners. I refrained from using Google ads altogether.

All in all, I get an average of US$450 a month - nothing to shout about.

Running a forum sometimes feels like running a company. You’ve to manage your member and staff expectations, which isn’t easy considering the diversity in terms of age, language, culture, geographic location, timezone, etc. Some are sensitive, some think you’re being strict, others are resistant to change, some want attention and another one power-hungry. I think you get the picture. ;)

Of course it gets into your head too that you’re head honcho of such a big community. Banned members may beg you to be given a second chance while an aspiring moderator will suck-up to you. It’s an ego-boosting feeling to be the owner of a popular forum and certainly useful for my resume.

So why am I thinking of selling the forum. Let you know in the next and final post. ;)