Are there too many forums?

[Cory]

Perhaps - although I'm hoping the increased competition would encourage all those forums to make improvements!

Yeah, competition isn't always a bad thing, it can help bring some uniqueness to forums, but people are always copying off features of forums onto their own forums.

 

[Kyng]

Yeah, competition isn't always a bad thing, it can help bring some uniqueness to forums, but people are always copying off features of forums onto their own forums.

Yeah, copying isn't good.

I want more forums, but I want more different and unique forums - not more clones of the same forum!

 

[Ravenfreak]

I don't think there are too many forums, honestly I'd say there's far too less forums online these days. Most forums that do thrive and have different member bases usually have been around for a long time or cater to a special niche. If you do something unique with your forum, you may get more accounts and activity. Thing is, it can be difficult to come up with unique ideas when so many ideas have been done many times.

 

[Arantor]

It's also worth noting that some communities have a natural lifespan, wither and die, and that's... normal.

Let's take an example of something from back in the day. The late 1990s when I first got online, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was *huge*. Fan forums everywhere. The original series ran 1997-2003, with its spin-off Angel running 1999-2004. While there are comic books in the years that followed, it really wasn't the same - and while I'm sure there are Buffy fan sites still out there, the majority would have withered and died after 2004 when the mainstream viewership of the show ended.

Same deal really with any forum tied to some other existing material, where without that material's continued generation the forum has limited lifespan of its own. Not to say that you can't keep a forum alive without it but it's that much harder than a forum about an ever-green topic.

Similarly observe the decline in enthusiasm on the forum admin circuit. The Other Place we don't talk about used to be so much busier than it is now, because so many more people were talking about forums and running forums.

 

[joelr]

I wrote a guest article a community's lifecycle for IPB:

Master your community's lifecycle to increase your growth

“Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.” – Richard Branson, billionaire and founder of Virgin Group. We all seek success with our Invision Communities. For too many of our communities, however, we yearn for success but we don’t plot the correct navigation to get ...

invisioncommunity.com

In the final stage, you've essentially expanded to the entire size of your audience and engagement naturally plateaus.

My main point in the article is that you need to focus on the areas most important for your community's lifecycle.