Any suggestions for monetizing forums?

[cressstone]

I would appreciate any advice on the best ways to monetize forums.

Do you own any forums? What methods do you use?

Thanks.

[petertdavis]

Without knowing what the forum is, any advice beyond what I've given you in the other thread would be just shooting in the dark and a waste of both my time and yours.

[Clinton]

I'm no expert in monetising forums but I'll take a shot.

Apart from ads within posts, unobtrusive footer links and sponsored stickies, there are a few innovative appoaches I've seen.

mumsnet, a UK parenting website, has a huge member base and they invite people like politicians over for a live chat. They get a lot of sponsorship money from companies. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, was there recently answering questions from members.

webmasterworld.com, a webmaster forum, has no ads but the owner runs a conference every year. The huge readership of his forums makes the conference a well attended event and rakes in millions in conference fees and from the companies who wish to have a presence.

knoppix.net, about Linux boot CDs, makes no money on the forums at all but has a couple of basic pages selling an affiliate product (outside of the forum structure) and does very well out of those. The bulk of the site is the forums and there are just 2-3 pages outside of the community where the selling happens. Visitors come - and SEs send them - because of the huge volume of information on the forums and every forum page has a nav bar that includes links to the product pages.

dnforum charges for access to premium areas. Other forums using this technique restrict all trading and commercial posts to a paid area.

[BritishARMY]

Using ads, such as Google Ads. It depends on how popular the forums are and the niche. Don't use full page ads, they are annoying. You could do VIP access, they'd get a coloured username, special features, etc.