Are forums financially worth it?

In my opinion and from what i've seen it's harder and more expensive to start a forum.

* 1st of all you need a license for Vbulletin for example (no clue how much it costs) or PHPBB (it's free i think)
* Design ; 50 $
* appropriate hosting with bandwidth ; let's say 5$/month to start with, so 60$/year
* Quality and quantity links ; 200$/year
* Banners (making them and placing them) ; 100-200$
* Paid posting ; 100$

these are approximative prices, do not take my word for it!
please correct me if i'm wrong.

So, for the first year, if you do it alone you'll have to spend a minimum of 500$. Sure these expenses won't be the same in the long term.

how many users do you need to have to get back your investment and eventually make a $ or 2, how long can it take?
or is my budget simply not enough.

i am thinking as i have a small project sitting in the back of my mind and who knows...

thx guys

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i own an adult forum for which i have paid less than $150 to start and am getting 1k uniques a day (after 4 months)
not spent anything on marketing until now ($20) and am currently doing some search engine optimization
there are loads of cheap vbulletin licenses out there and also free designs and banner makers etc
even just get an image and then add some text for a banner until you are earning from the site
if you dont want to spend $500 then dont everything is possible you just gotta look around

For me, no. Forum monetization is a very easy job to do as per my experience goes. I started a forum with my partner two months ago and it has already earned 350+$ to be perfectly honest. The revenue is from Adsense and link sales.

However, as per as your post goes, the requirements you mentioned are somewhat needed. But, then you can take a little risk if you are even 80% sure that it will pay off.

- Just my 2 cents -
- Swastik-

I owned a forum awhile back, but it was mainly a teen-chat forum for my online friends and I. I put less than $50 into it, and it was quite successful for a period of time. Of course, like all good things, it came to an end. But we had some good times.
ANYWAY, my point is that, no, it should not be that money-consuming. Time-consuming, though, definitely! It's a lot of trouble, but eventually if you chose a good topic, well-targeted and advertised, you should earn the money back with some ads or donations. ^_^

thx 4 the tips

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Forums well we own and operate two. One is for California Beaches and the other is for Palm Springs, California.
Our purpose was not to sell anything from or on them but rather a communications to our friends and few members. We share updates about our products and services with our readers and members so indirectly the forum sort of brings us closer to our clients and makes us a little more accessable. Warm feeling for the clients.

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There are a lot of investment needed but if you have a strategy and work well on the marketing and promotion side, it can help to generate steady income. Imagine if you have high traffic forum, there are many ways to earn either from ads, sales of text links and from other revenues.

I think forums are a great way to get bucks. But I don't own one. ANyway, as a forum poster, i see a lot of new forums appear everyady (i've seen two this week). You can always recognize a startup forum by the way they pay people to make posts... :0

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If forums get fresh content then a good return can be achieved over investment. But it is not advisable to spend a lot of money on any thing other than content to start with. Adwords can be a good source for marketing.

i agree that content is king.
but obviously me, or whoever decides to open a forum cannot do it all by himself.
you have to have at least 4-5 different people to write it (different writing style and for potential new members to see that there are actual users and not 1 guy who writes everything by himself).
so this still costs u money...

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