Schneakers.com

We all know social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. They grow virally and the users create the pages and information on the pages for others to view. I believe another area on the internet that has been neglected is Internet Forums. I think a large multi-billion dollar company could emerge out of this particular industry. We all use internet forums to discuss our favorite topics, learn, ask important questions and sometimes to just socialize. Imagine an internet forum company that owned MANY large internet forums for different niche’s!

The basic model for internet forums is quite simple: Create an internet forum using VBulletin (the back-end software that powers most internet forums) which is created by Jelsoft Enterprises. After a unique site skin is created so the front-end of the site looks nice, the business is ready to go. Many plugins and customizations can be done in order to preform other tasks.

Overall, its very inexpensive to start a forum and can be done by professionals for just several thousand dollars. The hard part is getting people to use an empty forum. Considerable traffic must be driven to the forum in order to get it “popular” enough that it can grow organically. Once the forum has enough activity it will grow exponentially through the power of the internet.

The beautiful thing about the internet forums business model is that the users perform all the work! They create new threads to ask a question or discuss a particular topic. Others reply. They are creating information and content on the site - and they do all this work for free. If the forum is popular, people think it is an honor to be a forum moderator and “police” the forum by removing hurtful comments or remove spam. All the content that is being created is being indexed by search engines and help drive lots of traffic to the site.

Monetizing That Traffic

If the forum has users discussing and creating content, it is time to monetize all that traffic. Forums normally have lower advertising rates than other sites because the users are typically repeat browsers. Also, since the user is busy conversing, they may not notice advertisements. The traffic can be monetized in several ways though: Pay per click advertisements like Google’s Adsense program, banner ads and cost-per-action (commission based payment scheme) can all be utilized.

Examples of Forums

PokerForums.Org: The Forum was created about three years ago and today it has over 9,000 members and 200,000 posts! The site gets 16,500 unique visitors per month and 150,000 page views. The website owner sells the ads directly on the site. The site takes a few hours a day to run which mainly entails checking emails from potential advertisers. So how much does it make? We don’t know exactly but we know that it makes between mid to high $x,xxx per month. The only real cost is hosting which is low. Consider this: The owner is a young twenty something that barely works two hours a day and yet pulls in over $70,000 a year. He has found financial freedom because of how efficient the forum business model is!

SprintUsers.Com: The Forum owner also runs many other forums, which shows us that forums don’t take THAT much time to manage when you have a set of community volunteers in place to moderator the discussion. This forum uses a cost-per-click advertising system and a commission based advertising system to generate revenue. The site makes high $xx,xxx per month with more than 120,000 members.

So…

These forums took off from the power of the internet. Their user bases are VERY small compared to sites like Facebook which have millions of users, and yet they can generate decent revenue streams. What I’m saying is this: If an investor was able to get together with forum owners and form one large internet media company (either give shares in the company for a forum or pay cash for the forum) and create a few forums along the way, a large network of forums under one company could be very valuable! It would be easy to market advertising solutions to Fortune 500 companies for the larger advertising rates and it could eventually go public through an IPO and be worth billions! If Facebook, a company that doesn’t generate $1 dollar in revenue is worth $15 billion (according to Microsoft!), then what would an internet forum that is making millions be worth? Let’s not forget the company would continue to have very fast growth rates. The Company could also be sold to a large media company as well.

If large forum owners got together and pooled their properties under ONE company, they would be able to generate higher levels of revenue by getting Fortune 500 advertisers, increase efficiency and internet traffic and the number of forum users (by linking forums together as a large network), and ultimately sell the company for a lot more money. Together they are worth a lot more money than they are alone.

Sometimes when looking for an internet forum on a particular topic it can be hard to find a good one. You come across all sorts of forums that are full of spam or are completely dead from a lack of activity. It would be nice to have all the large forums networked together so you can find good forums on any topic very easily.