Monetization questions

[20abc22]

I apologize if this is not appropriate to ask in this forum, since this is not related to SMF as such.

Can you please recommend a resource (perhaps, even individuals) which will help me evaluate whether or not it is worth to monetize a forum (by this I mean putting ads on it).

And what I can expect per month based on current traffic (I assume some of it is not real users but various crawlers, etc.).

Thank you.

[Arantor]

Well, that's a tough one. I'm not sure I'm necessarily the best person but I'll have a go.

Monetising a forum works in two ways, you can place ads or you can engage in selling something via paid subscriptions (or a store, but paid subs is usually easier)

Ads rely heavily on having material that is advertisable - if the forum is about things people won't want to advertise against, you might have difficulty monetising. Hard to say without knowing what the forum is about, but generally unless you're reaching out to advertisers yourself, anything contentious (pornography, politics, swearing, even mentions of the word death) tends to be less favourable if using Google Adsense. You see this especially in YouTube videos where content creators would rather say "unalive".

And you're wholly at the mercy of advertisers and what they're prepared to pay for the space you have. Or, again, unless you're brokering deals with advertisers directly, you're actually really at the mercy of what Google or its kind think your ad space would be worth. Not that they will tell you this up front.

Meanwhile there is always the option of paid subs. Forums are about content, and it's very possible that whatever niche you're in, you can produce premium content your members would be willing to pay for. Chances are this is likely to make you more money than ads. Again, hard to know what to suggest without some context.

End of the day, monetising a forum means making money off the content your members are producing. Presumably you are also creating content in there with them. You need to have something worth selling for that transaction to happen - and that does mean that you need to have regular footfall, regular visitors stopping by either to see ads, or to engage with whatever content they'd be paying for.

I suppose the question is: do you have anything you could sell to your members, and/or do you have enough human traffic to warrant selling ad space. If you don't already, get something like Google Analytics involved, see how many people are actually visiting, how long they're staying (which in turn gives you some idea how many ads they're likely to see) and go from there.

[20abc22]

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate it.

At this point it is impossible to imagine that someone would pay for that content, but quite a few people visit several times a day. We do have repeat 'customers', or rather, content consumers.

Some content is quite unique and is not found anywhere else.

I do have Google Analytics, but I am not very good yet at interpreting the data.

For example, since the site was implemented:

New users by 
First user default channel group   

FIRST USER DEFAULT CHANNEL GROUP    NEW USERS
Direct    7.6K
Referral    796
Organic Social    593
Organic Search    276
Organic Video    8


Average engagement time
12m 14s
Engaged sessions per user
2.3
Average engagement time per session
3m 52s

In December we had some crazy amount of views - over 1M, although I do understand these are only partially real user views.

I mean it would not hurt putting Google AdSense on, but I would like to have an idea of what to expect in terms of revenue with this kind of stats.

I ask this because I want to offer other folks that write an incentive. The more posts, the more they can get from earnings proportionally.

[Arantor]

The main metric Google uses for suggesting what you 'could' earn is number of monthly page views. Their 'calculator' such as that's a thing - https://adsense.google.com/start/#calculator - starts at 50,000 views per month, excluding bots.

That might give you some ballpark in terms of revenue for the sector you're in, but I'm not sure from those numbers that you're actually doing 50k page views a month once you exclude bots? Hard to say from those numbers.

[20abc22]

Thanks for the suggestion and the info!

How do I exclude bots?

[Arantor]

Google Analytics numbers should generally exclude bots, and you should be able to get some "monthly views" numbers from it, I haven't looked at that part since GA4 came around so I'm not sure where to direct you to get it from, but it should be in there.