What methods would you not do to monetize your forum?

[Cpvr]

There are some monetization methods that forum owners use that are overboard, especially stuffing their forums with a ton of advertisements, but what are some of things that you wouldn’t do to monetize your forum?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I wouldn't use AdSense. The old days allowed you more control of where ads displayed, now they're all over the place. I use it blogs but to me that's a little different. I feel like they'd be more of a bother to members on a forum versus a blog.

How about you?

 

[Cpvr]

I wouldn't use AdSense. The old days allowed you more control of where ads displayed, now they're all over the place. I use it blogs but to me that's a little different. I feel like they'd be more of a bother to members on a forum versus a blog.

How about you?

You’re still able to control the size of the adsense ads and the placements depending on what software you’re using.

But, I wouldn’t use infolinks to monetize my forum.

 

[frm]

I wouldn't use AdSense. The old days allowed you more control of where ads displayed, now they're all over the place. I use it blogs but to me that's a little different. I feel like they'd be more of a bother to members on a forum versus a blog.

Yeah, the autoads feature doesn't work quite well on forums. But, you can still make individual ad blocks the size you want, like @Cpvr mentioned.

But, I wouldn’t use infolinks to monetize my forum.

They worked well on my forex forum, but I wouldn't use them now as they are very "misleading" to a community as they could interpret them as internal links to another section of the forum. I quite often like to link threads within other threads using phrases, so it would definitely throw people for a loop if I put them in.

I might consider a test run with them if they can be displayed for guests only, but I wouldn't subject members to seeing them.

I much rather go right to the source and work out contractual terms and placements. You can get a lot more for an ad than with AdSense taking their, what, like 60%? A lot of businesses have $1000 for ad spend and I'd take the full cut from them for a term of like 3 months (of course, this all depends on the forum size/traffic and what business you're dealing with).

 

[Heatman]

I've seen porn ads pop on one forum that I used in past. It was the worst thing I've seen since I started using forums. Some of the ads contains sêx toys and how ladies uses it.

I would never use such disgusting means to monetize a forum.