When do you consider a forum as "successful"?

[Bruceper]

I started my first forum last september (with phpbb) and it was very slow going for a while. I advertised a little but mostly by word of mouth and another two sites of mine had links to the forum. Around the 8th month I switched to vbulletin and got vbseo.

It took 6 months to get 100 members, 3 more months to get up to 200 members and another 2 months to hit 300+. Now at 300+ I consider the forum to be somewhat successful (activity wise, I'm not even considering income here)

So I was just wondering, at what point do other consider their forums somewhat successful (activity wise)?

[briansol]

IMO, 100 posts a day is a good forum. Anything less than that borders on "slow". And IMO, slow boards aren't really successful.

I've had one take off... and i've had 4 others do next to nothing, and now i'm starting my 5th.

I don't do any advertising on than linking all my sites together through my blog (i place a link to my blog on all my sites)

Like beauty, success is in the eye of the beholder. If you feel that you've helped even 1 person to do something better, then your efforts were not in vain.
For others, and a more business aspect, it needs to at least break even on server costs.

Luckily, I have 1 forum that supports my dedicated server bill each month, so I don't have to worry about the other sites being a flop and taking out of pocket.... so they can run and stay up, even with next to no activity.

[Joe Ward]

I suppose it depends on how large your audience is & how well you are attracting them. One way might be to compare with another forum that deals with a similar topic. How do you stack up against them?

It's definitely good that your member growth rate is increasing, as demonstrated by the decreased time required for every additional 100 members.

[Bruceper]

Thanks for your reply, I suppose from a business point I'm not after a big income yet. I figure that will come with popularity and time.

As for helping, I can't count the number of users that have been helped by myself and other members. To me it's all good from that standpoint.

[Nicke]

I looked the number of signups for the last 30 days and it was 787 new users, I would say that is successful.

People post about 300-500 on average day (Some days a lot more) but I personally think its little bit too much, if you have around 100 posts a day you can keep up with it, now people cant read everything anymore and a part of the atmoshpere is lost.

[jbartle]

Well, I started my site October 10th, 2005 and I have ~16,000 members. As of March of this year, I changed to vBulletin. When I made that change, I started doing more advertising and I've been doing about 60-100 members a day...depending on the day of the week. At times we've hit 150+ a day, but those are the good days :P

Anyways, as of recently, my site was FINALLY indexed into google...I had to wait for a year now. I now have 300+ indexed pages (this is the first week I've seen results...and the indexed pages keeps going up day by day). Ever since I installed vBSEO with and enabled the adsense targeting, I've been receiving $20-30/day so within the first week of me purchasing vBSEO, it already paid for itself. Then the second week paid for my server, then the rest is net income which I sometimes host cash prizes

My site is a Gaming site, so I was really surpised to see the site grow this fast seeing as there are a ton of gaming sites. So I'm very happy with the results I've seen with vbulletin and vBSEO...I feel both have made my site successful and I recommend it to everyone that I talk to.

[Bruceper]

Thanks everyone for your answers.

I just checked and VB says there is an average of 7 new threads daily and an average of 50 posts daily.

For me, that's acceptable for now. Although I'd like to see more new threads, there really aren't any threads that are empty which is nice to see.

[Mike]

I won't consider one of my forums "successful" until I am averaging 1,000 posts per day. In addition, I want to look at the main individual forum and see the entire forumdisplay loaded with threads all replied to showing "today". My settings are set to show 30 threads on page 1.

I have similar goals for the second forum I started.

As for the others, not totally sure yet. I expect the traffic to be more spread out on one of the remaining forums, and the other one is a new area for me.

[hornstar6969]

My site has now been opened for just over a year. In the past 3-4 months it has almost doubled in everything.

I now get around 1400 new posts a day and around 140 new threads a day. I get around 150 new people sign up a day and get around 1200 members visit my site a day with around 18k members in total. Remember this has really picked up in the last few months and is still building and growing all the time.

I have found these last few months to be successful however trying to maintain a clean and spam free site is no longer possible and lately I have had to close threads as they are getting out of control.

Just yesterday a new thread was made, today I closed it as it was already 18 pages long. Over 600 people had downloaded the attachment in just 1 day, that was insane for my site.

I'm always trying to make my site more unique and more user friendly but it is quite hard when you have so many topics to discuss on such a site like mine.

So overall I would say when you are having at least 10% of your total population keep comming back to your site you are doing something right.

[mdvaldosta]

That's hardcore hornstar, really impressive. I'd say "successful" depends on what you compare it to. What you think is good today, tomorrow may be small change.

[majordude]

I monitize it.

Hosting + vB license + vBSEO license + my time = $$

Offset that with ads, clickbank, etc...

If I make $, that sucks... $$, I'm even... $$$, I'm making a profit (I'm successful).

[dutchbb]

It's very relative, but any site that makes any profit and delivers good content at the same time I call succesfull.

[majordude]

For me, I have enough hobbies. I need cash flow!

Monetize your forums, turn a profit, and it's no longer a hobby.

[magna]

For me a forum is successful when the members other then you and a few of your friends enjoy to talk in the forums without asking them - in which I am still seeking out they rather play games on my site then to discuss things which may just be my downfall but I am not going to deactivate the game system just because no one but me is posting in my community.

[hornstar6969]

Yeah I agree a forum where people enjoy to talk not just enjoy the features or just the stuff that is there (leechers comming to download stuff is not successful) but the people who discuss and enjoy those features are what you want in your community.

Last month I was having 800-900 members on a day, now ive got 2000+ members per day, and 500+ people on at any time, its almost trippled in a month and its still growing every moment, but the only downside is, im not making any more money with all these people so far, and the sever just got quite cramped lol...time for an upgrade.