Starting a Forum and Making Money from It
Forums are tough in every sense of the word. From getting people to join and keep visiting to getting people to moderate them, Forums are tough. But from that hard work of sticking with it can come great rewards.
I recently came upon, through a co-worker who knows this guy, a random blog published by someone who runs a Forum that I happen to belong to. This publisher recently was offered $25,000 for a golf forum that had, at last check, over 6,000 members and over 15,000 pages indexed in Google.
The Forum is Golf Rewind and if you visit the site you’ll notice the publisher hasn’t done much in the way of monetizing the site. Therefore I think $25,000 was a shot in the dark offer and with some monetization on the publishers part he could get a lot more than that offer. Which I think is why he didn’t sell the forum.
It would be interesting to know the traffic numbers as well as why he doesn’t monetize every single forum thread. I see only a few with small Google ads placed in obscure places that probably don’t have high click-through rates.
I will try and track this person down and find out more about the offer and the plan for Golf Rewind but this publisher has put in a lot of time and effort making a site that has high traffic, excellent repeat visitors and a good place to make money. Forums are tough to maintain and you gotta give him credit for keeping with it.
Comment from Truth Teller
Time: February 9, 2007, 5:24 am
You should contact one of the original moderators about GR. The owner may have initial set the place up, but he had nothing to do with the traffic or the membership. He has not been to the site but once in the last two years. The moderating team built the membership, not the administrator.