Creating a forum... with NO ads?

[lludawg]

I am a part of a huge forum that never used ads and never will. They have a beautiful site layout which they feel would be ruined if they used ads. Instead, these admins grew the forum using their own hard earned money and currently they are the number one active forum in the niche. They are so big that they had to upgrade servers because they got too much traffic. This new server is very expensive to run and without ads, there was no way that these admins could afford it. So they decided to accept donations. They made over $500 is 5 days! Is this a better way to go rather than using ads?

 

[Robmaniac]

I'd like to know how they actually earn revenue. Is it subscriptions or what?

 

[Rihtar]

It really depends on your niche, visitors and why you're starting the forum in the first place. I think that the donation system is good for websites with huge audiences or that are ran simply for the fun of running a website. If you plan on monetizing your forum, I believe that ads and/or subscriptions are still the best way of doin' it.

 

[lludawg]

I'd like to know how they actually earn revenue. Is it subscriptions or what?

I believe they just used money from their 9-5 jobs and did not care about gaining revenue.

 

[Jordan]

What is the niche of the forum?
I own a general discussion forum that is much larger than this site, (Hosts over a millions posts) and I do not put ads on it at all.
This site is a webmaster niche, so will do much better in the fact that it has a target audience.

Some people who own and run websites are just completely against ads to begin with. Look at wikipedia. One of the worlds largest websites in the world. They do not place a single ad on their site. Instead, they take donations which seems to keep them alive.

 

[Robmaniac]

I believe they just used money from their 9-5 jobs and did not care about gaining revenue.

So they aren't earning any cash from it. Ok I guess

 

[milksheikh]

I have never thought about asking for donations from my members.

I don't think it will be necessary for me.

 

[Roach]

I also would like to know what niche it is. Do they have other web projects that they advertise on that forum which earns them revenue? It would be quite easy to run a ad free forum for a little while but in the long run it would be hard to fund.

 

[lludawg]

What is the niche of the forum?

It is a Kpop forum.
http://onehallyu.com/

It looks like they have donation weeks every once in a while not just all the time. I feel like this is a better way to receive donations rather than have donations available all the time. Members receive a really cool "DONOR" award which stays for a few months.

 

[Jordan]

It is a Kpop forum.
http://onehallyu.com/

It looks like they have donation weeks every once in a while not just all the time. I feel like this is a better way to receive donations rather than have donations available all the time. Members receive a really cool "DONOR" award which stays for a few months.

To have this type of system though you would need a real active community that are dedicated to the forum. That forum looks like it is a big forum so I am not surprised this type of funding would work for them.

 

[Spudster]

You don't have to have ads right away

 

[CMPuLs3]

Very interesting tactic, but not one that would work all the time.

 

[Shortie]

This is a great way of doing things I never really thought to do something like this to be honest.

Making a forum and relying on your own hard earned money seems like a better way to get yourself known and get yourself a reputation rather than relying on a lot of ads to do just this. Once you have a good reputation and a lot of genuine active members who enjoy the forum they are then going to be more willing to help out with as stated donations which is always a better way than expecting members to deal with advertisements.

 

[Alexis]

I don't think it is the better way to go! donation is great to build a project but not to keep it running; unlike you make it like you request subscription from your members.

If will prefer at least in-text advertising to banner advertising to earn money with a forum!

 

[Riggy]

I really don't know why you wouldn't try and put in ads somewhere around the site. By the sounds of it you'd get a tone of money out of it! Then again, each to their own. You are obviously very proud of the site and so you are putting the site before money, which is very respectable. I personally would always try and put ads in to get some extra money. You can still attempt donations as well every so often just like you are doing... ads are just a constant source of revenue for the site. People may stop donating after a while.

 

[Ed321]

Therein lies the rub... the double-edged sword. You need to be fully-functional and established long enough to have loyal users who have seen the value you provide in order to coax donations out of them and you really need that money upfront to create this wonderful destination.

I think there is probably a happy medium. Use some ads right from the beginning, but keep them in very unobtrusive locations on your site. You don't make much in ad revenue in the beginning anyway, so you just need to do your first year's budget based on the fact ad revenue will be miniscule. You won't scare aware the purists if the ads aren't blasted at them, yet it leaves you the opportunity to experiment with their placement as you become more established.

I think asking for donations from day 1 is an underutilized method of raising revenue. Don't be afraid to give out some of your hopes and dreams for your project and let people know their contribution will make these new features possible. I think there are also people who like to feel they are "responsible" for the success of a site and not just taking advantage of it after the fact.

 

[Goat of Departure]

It's either they're really rich or they have something under their sleeve. It's hard to maintain a big site without getting some help from ads and other sources of revenue. If you ask me, it's almost impossible to just rely on donations not unless the site is big enough and have a lot of loyal members that are willing to pitch in. I think they might be using ads but only in the right places. Some sites seem to not have ads but if you take a look deeper they actually do.

But why wouldn't you want to put ads? Unless you're site is an anti-ads site then that's acceptable but ads is probably the most reliable source of revenue and it would be of great help to them if they put on some ads since they've already made a lot of traffic and if the members are kind of enough to throw in donations then I'm sure they wouldn't mind having a few well placed ads to help out their favorite forum.

 

[Kleineganz]

It's either they're really rich or they have something under their sleeve. It's hard to maintain a big site without getting some help from ads and other sources of revenue. If you ask me, it's almost impossible to just rely on donations not unless the site is big enough and have a lot of loyal members that are willing to pitch in. I think they might be using ads but only in the right places. Some sites seem to not have ads but if you take a look deeper they actually do.

But why wouldn't you want to put ads? Unless you're site is an anti-ads site then that's acceptable but ads is probably the most reliable source of revenue and it would be of great help to them if they put on some ads since they've already made a lot of traffic and if the members are kind of enough to throw in donations then I'm sure they wouldn't mind having a few well placed ads to help out their favorite forum.

I am not really rich but I still have no ads on my forum. I have a great hosting plan for my business website with unlimited bandwidth/storage space, so I'm able to host multiple websites off the same hosting account - so it doesn't cost me any more to host 1 or 10 websites (or more if I really wanted to). I have the hosting for my business, which for me is a business tax-writeoff. All my extra sites on that account only cost me the annual domain registration fee, and that's it.

You really don't need to be rich in order to have a forum and I see no real need to have ads.

 

[Goat of Departure]

I am not really rich but I still have no ads on my forum. I have a great hosting plan for my business website with unlimited bandwidth/storage space, so I'm able to host multiple websites off the same hosting account - so it doesn't cost me any more to host 1 or 10 websites (or more if I really wanted to). I have the hosting for my business, which for me is a business tax-writeoff. All my extra sites on that account only cost me the annual domain registration fee, and that's it.

You really don't need to be rich in order to have a forum and I see no real need to have ads.

You're pretty lucky there and I think you got an awesome service but you can't really assume that kind of thing will stay the same forever. Some services offer that kind of thing because for the most part they can still manage it but I assure when it comes to the point that you're hitting their traffic limit and that you're websites are gathering in so much they might approach you and say "Hey you might want to pay us extra because we can't handle your site load anymore."

 

[Kleineganz]

You're pretty lucky there and I think you got an awesome service but you can't really assume that kind of thing will stay the same forever. Some services offer that kind of thing because for the most part they can still manage it but I assure when it comes to the point that you're hitting their traffic limit and that you're websites are gathering in so much they might approach you and say "Hey you might want to pay us extra because we can't handle your site load anymore."

This is with GoDaddy and I've been hosting sites with them for 15 years. It's never been an issue.