I have been running a forum for owners of Konica Minolta or Sony DSLR cameras for a while now. The membership continues to grow, but slowly. So far there are nearly 600 members, although like most forums, not all of them are active.
Initially I ran the forum with phpBB, which although was good, seemed to be updated every other day which got to be a problem. So I made the switch to SMF or Simple Machines Forum which was opensource but much much better than phpBB in my opinion. The look of it and the operation and administration was a major improvement over phpBB, so all was good.
I ran adsense ads on the forum, a banner at the top and a long tower ad down the right hand side. This was bringing in a small amount, on average about $2 per day. $2 a day doesn’t seem like much, but that’s $60 a month which is enough to pay for my hosting so it was good for me.
When SMF updated their forum, I changed the forum theme to a nice looking new one, with a few modifications made by me. I dropped the adsense ads for a while as I needed to make sure the forum was running properly. I made the decision to keep the forum ad free for registered users, an incentive to register. So I am now trying to monetize the forum again, but for guest visitors only, and see if I can bring back the earnings to pay for my hosting, that’s my first aim at least.
Using the adsense ‘heat map’ for forums, which gives advice to where ads perform best on forums, I have now placed adsense ads before the first post on the thread display page and before the first board/category on the homepage, but only for guests. I’ll be monitoring this over the next week or two to see if it makes a big difference and I’ll report back here.