I’m evaluating the possibility of providing a service involving providing a paid online discussion forum service to webmasters, competing with free software available from every cpanel. I’m NOT trying to sell anything and really would benefit from hearing your story of why you did (or did not) do it and what happened. Did you have trouble getting enough visitors? What problems come with running/starting a discussion forum?
Good luck with that business model.
The Internet is littered with hundreds of thousands of FREE web forums - just like this one here.
If you want people to pay for that, you better come up with a rather strong business proposition.
Do you have one in mind?
The business model I am thinking of would be free to the user, just not to the website owner. …I’m thinking of a model where the forum categories would (potentially) be the same for multiple sites. ex. I might have posted, and replied to this thread from tinysite.com/forum even though you are on community.sitepoint.com. The webmasters give up a small amount of control, but get a bigger, more active community. For forum start-ups this could be a desperately needed help by pooling forum activity with other sites to get enough activity to self-sustain their forum.
You want to sell forum software?
There are tons of free opens out there already.
Why would someone want to buy forum software unless you provide “enterprise support”?
Trying to help, but not seeing where there is a demand for what you have said.
At first I was with mikey_w, but I see what you’re saying now and I like it. Good Luck.
That said, starting communities is incredibly hard to hook people and get return visitors. Sitepoint is a fairly large site and has been around for quite a long time, yet the community on the forum is moderately sized.
I would suggest, that if this is your business model, to give it free to the initial sites you try to hook for the sake of building up a larger community and to get more sites on board. Or just not charge the sites at all and to use your own ads, like Reddit.
Thanks, at this point I need a lot of luck. I’m a little concerned about if this really will appeal to webmasters who have the resources to create a successful forum.
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