Publishing Ads in Message Forums

It seems to me that most folks look at forums as a lousy place to publish ads for the revenue of a web site. I think, the reason so many people believe this is for a number of reasons...the majority of the reason, I think, is because people won't do what is necessary to make it successful.

The vast majority of people running forums use some open source script such as PHPBB, Simple Machines, or other such forum script. Many of those users have little to know coding experience, and, at best, can edit the primary template files of the forum. These basic edits limit forum admins to having very simple places ads in the header or footer and that's about it.

If one is ambitious enough to create their own forum script, or, learn to hack the one they use (and re-hack with every update released), much more effective ad publishing is possible.

The trick with forums isn't necessarily having an ad or two on the page, but having them buried within the conversation. If one can place an ad within the thread, every few replies, show an ad, it is much more effective then a standard, template-based header and footer ad.

A 728x90 leaderboard between replies every 3 or 5 replies gets attention and clicks as people scroll through the conversation. Depending on how your forum is built, a nice rectangle ad next to the reply/post text area for posting your messages is pretty readily visible as well.

Being creative, and taking the time to editing your script to accommodate such placements can be very rewarding financially if you have a high traffic forum.