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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

forums don't make any money.

I know a guy who runs a very successful forum...#1 forum for a particular car niche...has 110K registered users, and about 50K uniques a month, and 1 million page views.

Know how much he makes? $2,500 a month. $500 from Adsense, $1000 from selling car parts, and $1000 from direct advertising sales.

$2,500 is not bad, until you throw in the cost of servers and bandwidth....after all is said and done, at the end of the month he clears about $600.

Sure $600 is nothing to sniff at, but he's been running the forum for 10 years now....so you would think at that level it'd be making a ton more money than that.

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You're absolutely right that after 10 years, he should be making more from that website. That stats speak for themselves. You alluded to the fact that 2,000-3,000 people might be daily active visitors (just considering your "night" comment). How many of the 110k users are active? If he's only getting 50k uniques a month, it's likely that only 10%-20% of his registered users are active.

A registered user doesn't count for anything if he/she doesn't come back.

Either way, I think his issue is proper monetization. Everyone hates Adsense, they're return visitors to the forum, not visitors from search (Adsense does better with visitors direct from search).

When was the last time your friend investigated hosting options? $1900 a month for hosting a forum with 50,000 uniques sounds crazy to me.

Servers and Bandwidth for a site doing 1 million page views a month should cost at most a couple hundred bucks, maybe $500 if you go overboard. If he is spending $1900 a month on servers that is ridiculous.

he has a lot of regulars. Gets something like 2,000-3,000 people on at the same time every night + it's an old site, so there are a ton of threads, I think something like 2 million at this point.

Infrastructure wise, I know that he has 4 web servers, 2 DB servers, and 1 image server...I'm not certain on specs, but I believe all of them are dual xeons.

But yeah it's pretty crazy, since it's a hobby, I'm sure he is getting things that he doesn't really need.

Another thought: it also depends on how much time he puts into it. If it's 5 hours a month in maintenance, it's probably worth the ~$72,000 he's made over 10 years?

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