I think forums are easily the most undervalued type of website on the internet. That can be a great thing if you’re in the market to buy a forum, but terrible if you’re trying to sell advertising on your forum. There will always be skeptics out there, but the thing that has amazed me is the attitude of the actual forum owners themselves.
I was blown away to read a thread on bigboardadmin.com the other day about how to make your forum look less like a forum. To give some background, in order to be a member of bigboardadmin.com you need to own a forum of 100,000 posts or more. You would think that these owners would know how to make their sites successful, but they don’t. The fact is that most forum owners have no idea how to sell advertising on their site and therefore sell themselves short. They actually believe that a forum isn’t worth as much as other internet properties and therefore they try to mask their sites so they don’t look like a forum anymore.
So what is the cause of this mindset? Over the years, advertising has been sold via CPM, or Cost Per Thousand Impressions (M = Roman numeral for thousand). CPM based advertising has been used in television, newspapers, radio and now the web. It’s nothing new and it’s a system that has worked for a lot of websites. The problem is that most forums have an amazing amount of pageviews per user and therefore the value of each impression is altered. The sad thing is that this is where most forum owners give up.
So what is the solution? I believe we need a unique approach to selling advertising on a forums and I think in the end we could find that our traffic is much more valuable than we would have ever thought. Next time we will look at what makes a forum better than other sites.
Excellent topic of discussion!
Was that my post?
Here is my situation and why this came up. We are attempting to do something that hasn’t been done before in our specific niche too often - sell specific ad contracts directly to very large computer companies. To do this, we hired exclusive representation and we have worked with them quite a bit on selling a *forum* versus a site. We have gotten the same speech that every other forum has gotten: “forums have too many pageviews per unique,” “forum traffic isn’t as high quality,” etc.
In order to combat this mindset, we have had to come together to develop a stategy to sell our forum as extremely high quality and an excellent addition to their media buys. We are emphasizing branding, market presence among their most loyal customers, the ability to be in the most intimate consumer discussions about their products and service, extremely warm leads (those shopping to spend right now), repeat traffic and therefore their 7 impressions per customer for a lasting memory is being acheived, etc.
Part of this is also coming a little bit closer to center on certain things - like formatting. The advertisers that we are targetting are simply NOT going to spend their ad budgets on forum sites. Perhaps in the future, but not right now. However, if we present them with a site that looks to be a nice mix of static content and forum content as well as our benefits that I mentioned earlier, we should be able to get to a place where they feel like their advertising dollars will be well spent.
Would this be necessary for most forums? No, I wouldn’t think so. There are large ad networks that will serve you RON inventory for low CPM rates and that is the best you can get due to the board topic, traffic, etc. However, to get consistently high $XX CPM rates, IMO a forum needs to stand out and do something different. And besides, it has been really fun coming up with ways to bridge the gap between forum content and static content witout losing the interactive nature that makes forums so great. It’s the best of both worlds…
I look forward to reading your follow-up!
Laura
I’ve discovered a unique way to sell advertising on my forum which has helped quite a bit. My niche community has forums with their own niches. When an advertiser approaches me, they really are interested (usually) in one area of my site and not the whole thing. I’ve been selling sponsorships to the unique areas of the site which includes: 1. Sponsored by link (in the forum description on the forum home page) 2. An ad at the top of that particular forum with their choice of text, content and graphics 3. 100K banners across the entire website (within rotation) 4. A “Sponsor graphic” and link on the landing page for that particular niche area of the site. (Hard to explain but we’ve provided index pages for each topic area, found in our tabs at top of our pages) We’ve found this has allowed a variety of sponsors, targeting their niche, while we don’t overfill the ads across the site.
Kathy, I would love to see those topic index pages would you mind sharing your website?
I am just now in the infancy stages of starting up an advertising strategy for my forum.
Sure Jeff: http://www.hystersisters.com (see tabs at the top of the page for our topic index pages.) Also see: http://www.girlsgetgoing.com .
Thanks Lee, Excellent stuff