Is your community self-sustaining?

Right now the forums are paid by the advertising revenue I get from the blog. Hope in few months to start selling some ads and getting money from them.

One of mine is now self-sustaining (took 5 years) and I also have a web directory with paid reviews/listings that helps bring in a few extra nuggets each month.

However, I'm not in profit yet as I've been personally funding all the running costs for the past few years and accrued a fair lump of debt in the process (you see, we really do do it for love!!).

I should break even in around 12 months time - hopefully.

My forum is a start up. I guess it will take long time till it becomes self-sustaining.

HI Justin

Can you please tell me what this means? Don't know if I've heard about this before.

Thanks!



gogo

The ad network I was referring to is Maingate Ads. They handle advertisements specifically related to the theme park industry, for websites based around theme parks. It was going really well last year but they seemed to have been having trouble selling the spots recently. Right now they're not serving anything, so I'm back on AdSense for the time being.

My only costs are hosting and promotion. Domain renewals too, if you will. The former is relatively cheap - just a few bucks a month. Promotion is what eats up my cash.

Some of the best wesbites are those that get their content from their userbase.

I am still paying for my forums and websites. I pay $120.00 a month but its well worth it because I have a big dedicated server with a lot of resources. I probably don't even use half the resources (especially since I am closing a lot of my sites and sticking to the active ones) but I feel good knowing it is there in case I need it. Kind of like my computer nerd security blanket, haha! However, my National Skywarn forum is starting to get a few premium members since I partnered up with the program to be the official forum

Might break even in a few months but currently everything is budgeted out of my other projects (blog/custom site) that bring in large profits that I simply put into the forums I run.