How much have you spent on your website or forum in terms of USD?

[fdk]

I have mentioned elsewhere that I had a great experience using Google Ads many years ago when growing my biggest forum. I saw a 300% return on my investment that I was able to track was purely through users gained through the advertising campaign over the course of just over a year, which I was very happy with.

At times with my biggest forum, our costs amounted to in excess of $2,000 a month. That being said, our income always exceeded this, and on occasions exceeded it significantly, so it was a worthwhile spend.

In terms of a potential new project I'm thinking of, my budget would be limited by what I thought offered value for money. I mean, sure I don't have $10,000 to put in at once, but if the project was right and I truly believed in it, I'd be willing to invest $1,000+ over the course of some months if I was building a viable business opportunity.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

At times with my biggest forum, our costs amounted to in excess of $2,000 a month. That being said, our income always exceeded this, and on occasions exceeded it significantly, so it was a worthwhile spend.

That's pretty expensive, but great that your income exceeded it.

I'm paying around $200 a month for my VPS but my blogs are paying for it and also giving me profit.

Your strategy is best, if you can earn more than you're paying to be online, you're on the right strategy.

 

[Cedric]

I have mentioned elsewhere that I had a great experience using Google Ads many years ago when growing my biggest forum. I saw a 300% return on my investment that I was able to track was purely through users gained through the advertising campaign over the course of just over a year, which I was very happy with.

At times with my biggest forum, our costs amounted to in excess of $2,000 a month. That being said, our income always exceeded this, and on occasions exceeded it significantly, so it was a worthwhile spend.

In terms of a potential new project I'm thinking of, my budget would be limited by what I thought offered value for money. I mean, sure I don't have $10,000 to put in at once, but if the project was right and I truly believed in it, I'd be willing to invest $1,000+ over the course of some months if I was building a viable business opportunity.

Curious what was on your expense list every month. It's great that you saw a profit, but I can't imagine what's costing you 2k a month.

 

[fdk]

That's pretty expensive, but great that your income exceeded it.

I'm paying around $200 a month for my VPS but my blogs are paying for it and also giving me profit.

Your strategy is best, if you can earn more than you're paying to be online, you're on the right strategy.

Yeah, our expenses weren't always that high, but once we'd rolled out a lot of features on our site and our traffic was growing on a monthly basis, the costs soon added up.

Curious what was on your expense list every month. It's great that you saw a profit, but I can't imagine what's costing you 2k a month.

Well, it was around 10 years ago so I can't remember exact lists of individual costs, but I know the total was somewhere in that range most months. Staffing costs/contributions cost us upto $500 a month, which might include some ad hoc small payments made to developers working on plugins or additional features for us, or graphics we were using in advertising. Our advertising budget was a minimum of $500 a month, but sometimes went as high as $1,000/month, depending on the time of the year (period in the football season) when it was most efficient for us to advertise.

In addition to this, we had hosting costs of around $300/month as we had grown so large we needed to be hosted at the time on a dedicated server that had a 24/7 response time of 30 minutes to any technical issues on the hosting side of things. Then we had monthly bills to a couple of API providers, who provided us with data feeds to run things like an interactive betting service on our forum, using forum currency, and a live commentary service that provided direct on-site feed to a forum thread with live text commentary of Premier League football games, updated roughly every 7-8 minutes, which back in 2012 or so, was quite a feat, something only really done by major media providers.

All of this made our bills in the region of $1,500-$2,500 a month, with some fluctuations, but as I said previously, I don't recall a month where our income didn't cover our costs, and of course, when we first started out, our costs were in the region of $50/year for the hosting + domain name only, these costs only developed as we grew into a huge community.

 

[Cedric]

That's cool though. It does add up quickly when running a forum. And this is something many community owners oversee. They're often not equipped for the growth. Every website has the potential to become a successful and nice income generating one, but only if you're able to pour something in first. Of course it has changed a lot since 10-15 years ago, and it's much harder to do today, but it's still possible.

If you're able to spend 500USD a month on advertising for a year or so, imagine the growth you'll see in a year.

 

[fdk]

That's exactly right. We were only able to make that kind of investment through slow initial growth and then a small upfront investment from me once I understood that the site had potential to reach the next level.

If I recall correctly, my total spend on the site before it started to generate an income was in the region of $500 - which was a lot of money for me as a teenager back then - but this spend was done over the course of close to a year, while the forum was growing and I was still learning a lot about becoming an administrator.

I was very fortunate that around 18 months after starting the forum, during our first phase of what I call "sustained activity", where we had 50 or so members posting a total of around 500 posts a day (double at the weekends), we had two people join the forum who each donated $150 to the site when we floated our idea of providing a betting service using the forum currency. Coupled with an additional $200 investment from myself, this enabled me to pay a developer to build the plugin and pay for the integration with the API provider, which is what I believe led to our first big explosion in activity. When the feature was released, over the course of the next month, our daily active users went from 50 > 250, and we sold $1,000 worth of forum currency/upgraded member subscriptions that month.

It was this initial spark that ultimately was what enabled the community to grow into what it eventually became. I took $100 of that money, bought myself and my family a lovely takeaway and went to the cinema, and put the other $900 straight back into advertising for the forum. Within another six months we were getting 3-4,000 posts a day and our member count was in the tens of thousands, and over the coming months our site grew to become what was essentially a small business run from my bedroom that for just over 2 years earned me between $1,000-$3,000 a month.

 

[Cedric]

That's exactly right. We were only able to make that kind of investment through slow initial growth and then a small upfront investment from me once I understood that the site had potential to reach the next level.

If I recall correctly, my total spend on the site before it started to generate an income was in the region of $500 - which was a lot of money for me as a teenager back then - but this spend was done over the course of close to a year, while the forum was growing and I was still learning a lot about becoming an administrator.

I was very fortunate that around 18 months after starting the forum, during our first phase of what I call "sustained activity", where we had 50 or so members posting a total of around 500 posts a day (double at the weekends), we had two people join the forum who each donated $150 to the site when we floated our idea of providing a betting service using the forum currency. Coupled with an additional $200 investment from myself, this enabled me to pay a developer to build the plugin and pay for the integration with the API provider, which is what I believe led to our first big explosion in activity. When the feature was released, over the course of the next month, our daily active users went from 50 > 250, and we sold $1,000 worth of forum currency/upgraded member subscriptions that month.

It was this initial spark that ultimately was what enabled the community to grow into what it eventually became. I took $100 of that money, bought myself and my family a lovely takeaway and went to the cinema, and put the other $900 straight back into advertising for the forum. Within another six months we were getting 3-4,000 posts a day and our member count was in the tens of thousands, and over the coming months our site grew to become what was essentially a small business run from my bedroom that for just over 2 years earned me between $1,000-$3,000 a month.

I love how you said you took $100 for yourself and spent the rest back to the community. Cool read though, nice case study!