Owning and operating a forum can be a tricky task. Not only do you have to struggle with the many obstacles of establishing the forum such as working on your initial member build up, getting rid of problem members early, and making sure your forum is easy to use, but there is also the major problem of monetization.
Forums are traditionally considered to be more difficult to monetize (if you are using ads to monetize the forum) than a regular website – mainly because of the type of visitor a forum receives. Typically, a lions share of the visitors on a forum are going to be from members who are there to participate in conversations, not click on ads. Regular forum members know what they are looking for and subsequently develop a very strong “ad blindness” which is difficult to overcome.
It is for this reason that many forum owners completely throw out the idea of using Google Adsense ads to monetize their forums.
But this is a mistake.
Forums, if optimized correctly, can experience clickthrough rates that rival those of normal websites. Of course, you need to go through the process of optimizing.
