Are you a forum owner that doesn't try to make money?

[Shawn Gossman]

Some of you don't make money on forums. Some of you don't even try to. Are you one of them?

Do you try at all? Or have you in the past or have making money never been on your radar?

 

[AWS]

I do it as a hobby. If it makes money ok if it doesn't ok too.

 

[Tracy]

I don't have any monetization processes in place on the site. Down the road that may change if the site grows, but that will be in the form of sponsorships and not stuff like general ads from ad networks.
My site was set up 6 years ago as somewhere for me and took it down when I got out of the hobby from aggravation of not being able to figure out how to work the equipment and went on to other things. 4 years ago I took it back up and the site was brought back online to give me somewhere to post content in a format I had control over and was comfortable with. It's grown quite a bit since then.

For a site that does not get advertised hardly at all, it's growing, but the registrations are not equating with posting, which is not a concern for me.



This is the biggest thing I am happy with (GA stats were reset to a new account about 2 months ago due to an issue with GA add-on).



With the increase in number of visits to the site, monetization would be easy enough to do, but I don't need to currently so why inflict that on the visitors?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

With the increase in number of visits to the site, monetization would be easy enough to do, but I don't need to currently so why inflict that on the visitors?

If you ever did wish to earn, you could use it all on contests and what not to give your members bigger prizes.

But to not want to make money at all and keep it as a hobby is perfectly fine, really.

I've not decided what I want to do with my forums, yet. I might just do what you're doing. I might have a premium membership and a donation page for those who want to donate to the bill, but I probably won't market it that much.

I'll typically upgrade to a premium account on forums that I like such as Administrata, Admin Junkies, Forum Promotion, and the likes. I do it to help out but also to show that I support everything they're doing.

 

[Tracy]

If you ever did wish to earn, you could use it all on contests and what not to give your members bigger prizes.

That would come in with the sponsorship routine. Frequently those sponsors are willing to donate items for such as they get free advertisement out of it that is frequently worth more than the donated item.
I have thought about doing raffles for some of the items that I currently buy to evaluate... but honestly most of those I purchase end up being used in my stable currently.