Everybody I’ve ever talked to, either in person or online, says the same thing: “my message board is costing me a fortune”. Advertising just never seems to cover operating costs. Surely there has to be an exception to this somewhere, though. Does anybody ever make a profit from a message board? I fully realize that that is not why people have message boards, of course. They exist for the purpose of sharing information and thoughts among people who have a common interest. But is there any way to do it without it costing an arm and a leg?
Yes.
We’re going to have a real world demonstration right here as this board quits charging and goes to ad support. Stay tuned for more developments.
Yes, there are lots of sites. And I envy each one of them, because my board actually COSTS me a hundred bucks a month. Think… my login name with dot com added after it.
I am not sure where all of those operating costs are supposedly coming from. I own my own domain as do lots of of people. It is professionally hosted with lots of bandwidth and it it comes with free message board software (http://www.phpbb.com/). I don’t use it for anything but I spent 15 minutes playing around with it when I first bought my website package. Assuming you already had some friends that wanted to play moderators and an afternoon to spare, you could easily have a message board that looks much like this one set up right away (growing the actual community is a different issue).
The total dollar cost of the entire website/message board/e-mail system/ftp server would be about $10 a month if you go crazy on it all and could be less than $5 a month for the whole thing. A migrant Ethiopian could afford to run an actual hosted message board within a custom domain. I am not sure where people are spending their cash unless it is very much indirect expenses.
Two sites that a lot of us spend time on seem to make cash hand over fist (Fark and SA)
Depends on your hosting. I run my blog on Bluehost, which gives me 1.5TB of space and 15TB of monthly bandwidth for under $100 a year – or about $70/year if I do a two year plan. Although we’ve tried a message board and it didn’t take off, it didn’t cost anything over and above the sticker price on the hosting plan; our host has PHPBB3 all ready to go when we want to use it.
We do have ads on the blog though, and they definitely cover costs. Actually, we make just about enough in ad revenue to cover base costs in about a month.
Running a message board is not the problem - running a successful one is. To get enough traffic to generate revenue from ads means that you have reached the point that your hosting entity is going to start charging for additional bandwidth and database storage and dedicated cpu and anything else they can think of. It really does work like that.
Si
I still can’t see it (at all; in the least). Message boards are all about text messages being posted to a simple piece of message board software and it simply doesn’t take up that much space. A few years ago, I asked about the bandwidth and storage requirements of the SDMB and got a detailed response from the IT staff. The storage requirements were about 2 GB total and the monthly bandwidth was less than that. The actual numbers don’t matter because the cost of today’s web hosting can literally be hundreds or thousands of times those requirements for just a few dollars a month. Web hosting is one of the most competitive businesses out there and most of it is automated.
Like I said, I own my own domain and I don’t care about a message board but I own just the throw-away rights to easily run a message-board much larger than the SDMB for free. There are no more system costs. It would just require a user base and free moderating plus free administratrors but that is what they do here. I don’t know how to make a lot of money at it but running the system part of it is as close to free as you can get.
The SDMB isn’t an enormously big or hugely popular message board though - at least, not any more. It’s true that text is fairly compact in terms of bandwidth and storage, but that should make almost any website cheap to run, yet, it doesn’t.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to pass the break-even point, of course - but to make ad revenue pay properly, you need lots and lots of page views - which consumes lots of bandwidth over and above that which can be observed as being consumed by the creation of new content. You need lots of people just visiting to take a look.
" You need lots of people just visiting to take a look"
That is the key to making money on a message board.
I have a forum related to my website that makes no money at all, and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg. I run it as a labor of love for the subject matter, and don’t expect to ever make money at it.
To make money you have to have ads and lots of visitors, since members don’t see the ads after joining. Visitors must click on the ads for the owner to make a few pennies, and actually click through and buy something to make any dollars.
I would say if you’re looking for a profitable revenue stream in the computer field, you’d do better to consider running a spam site than a message board.
And be sure to hire some Nigerians to run it.
You potentially can make a lot of money selling a message board you’ve developed.
The creator of GardenWeb reportedly sold it for close to a million bucks to IVillage.
I’m confused. Why would IVillage buy it for a million bucks if they didn’t expect to make at least two million from it?
It seems like your biggest cost is CPU crunching for searches. A host will let you consume as much bandwidth as is in your plan but if you start hogging the CPU, they’re going to politely ask you to upgrade to a bigger plan.
Yeah, that.
Sure, Mindfield is allowed to use up to 15TB of bandwidth a month, but if he starts getting anywhere near that much usage via lots of single sessions (instead of 10 people downloading his hypothetical 1.5TB file over one month), I betcha Bluehost changes their tune. That is, if PHPBB doesn’t blow up first.
There’s tons of great-looking hosting packages out there that give the impression that lots of bandwidth and lots of storage is cheap, but when you actually get to those promised levels the game changes. Your pipe, processor, Web server platform, database and bulletin board software all need to be in harmony to run a Fark-level bulletin board smoothly. That doesn’t happen for just pennies a day.
They do have a limit on CPU usage. If you exceed more than 10% CPU usage your site gets suspended for a few moments. (Literally, like, 5 seconds). I discovered this the hard way when an article I wrote got Dugg hard. They have the option to increase your CPU usage to 80%, but they’ll hit you up for $30/month to do it.
So, yeah, if your site does anything CPU intensive, they’ll crap on it.
But once you get Google to spider your site properly, which is often a result of a good site map you can search via Google and it works pretty darn well.
Most sites are horrible in being in terms of XHTML and XML and don’t bother doing a correct Google Site Map so they are spidered by Google very sparingly.
The main cost is if you are moderating it. You have to pay someone to do this basically. One full time employee can cost you a lot and volunteers are often unreliable or they have a point of view. Look at how Wikipedia has decline in the years due to the exodus of volunteers with differing viewpoints.
Also, if you run a music oriented forum like mine and have music files hosted (yes, they’re legal) on your server because of a jukebox type of modification installed, your disc space will get low really fast, in turn costing you even MORE money.