where to put Advertisement stuff ?

erich37

Well-known member
So thinking of running XF-Forums in the future, where would you put your advertisements (like banners, AdSense, etc.) ?

Which is the best place to put it into ?
Into Pages, into Threads ?
 
I think everyone will have their own opinion on this. You need to balance keeping your forum usable with also giving advertisers prominence. Personally I have three banner slots on my forum (one at the top, two at the bottom) which cycle randomly through a set number of advertisers. They use otherwise "dead space" and don't ruin the forum experience too much.

I haven't seen much mention of adverts here, whether this will be a feature included or not. I would hope it is in some form, and I hope it's easy to stick adverts in somewhere without it requiring huge changes to templates etc :)
 
I hide advertisements. I know, I'm a sinner. Anyhow, the best 'place' for them are usually the top and bottom of the forum index, and between posts. However too many, and it becomes annoying. It doesn't matter how they're placed if they're cosmetically pleasing. So I recommend that when you have a theme designed, you incorporate advertisements into the initial plan and not as an after-thought.
 
yeah, but I guess everyone needs to monetize his forum in order to cover costs. etc.
I guess I saw some AdSense-applications build into VB.

So you guys are all going for user-memberships ?
How are you going to monetize your forums ? I doubt you guys are all hobbyists and not making money on your forums.....
 
yeah, but I guess everyone needs to monetize his forum in order to cover costs. etc.
I guess I saw some AdSense-applications build into VB.

So you guys are all going for user-memberships ?
How are you going to monetize your forums ? I doubt you guys are all hobbyists and not making money on your forums.....

Right guessing logic.
Minimum hosting cost is about several hundred hk dollars per year in our side.(1us$=7.8hk$)
Can't agree anymore ... :)
 
yeah, but I guess everyone needs to monetize his forum in order to cover costs. etc.
I guess I saw some AdSense-applications build into VB.

So you guys are all going for user-memberships ?
How are you going to monetize your forums ? I doubt you guys are all hobbyists and not making money on your forums.....
Most sites I would probably put ads on, but my current project (That will be using XenForo), was never really going to use ads anyways (Maybe sponsored links that could be paid for to support the project, but not ads).

The niche we're focusing on has thousands of sites that over clutter their sites with ads and the communities have all gotten tired of it. Due to my contacts, overhead won't be all that high (Our main server is supplied by my work, and the cost is barely nothing compared to what you would normally pay for the same specs), and we will probably have subscription plans to deal with income for anything we'll need.

Ignore my project however, I have seen many forums that have grown to a large scale, never sticking ads on their sites. Subscription based forums can work, it just matters on the niche, and on whether or not you can market well enough to your forum to give them a reason to subscribe. 
 
some forums make money with the trick of having Private-Messages being only for paying members, especially match-making websites.
Not sure if this is a viable option and whether this can be achieved with XenForo ?

So what is the best way to monetize a XF-Forum ?
 
some forums make money with the trick of having Private-Messages being only for paying members, especially match-making websites.
Not sure if this is a viable option and whether this can be achieved with XenForo ?

So what is the best way to monetize a XF-Forum ?
Probably the same way any other forum system would, you would just have to sacrifice looks.
 
good to see that nobody here actually wants to make any money with their forums, but just want to change the world to be a better place :p
Heres a few of my forums:

1. game forum thats main purpose is to supply support for a program; most income was from sponsors and from donations.
2. anime community, most income is going to be from subscriptions, sponsors, as well as the community itself.

They're all self-supportive, which is all I want from them; I make more then enough at work, as well as from a few other things I do that I don't depend on my forums.

And it won't be difficult to make money off a XenForo community, I just hope the approach is much different then what most administrators do, plastering ads all over without much care for the end-user, or for the looks of the site.

It'll all depend on the niche of the community, as well as the approach the administrator takes to running his community and monetizing it. 
 
Personally I would go for:

Global header below nabber
Global footer above copyright
Sidebar (home only)
Below 1st post (guests only)

That would be ample adspots plus provide incentive for guests to register.

Putting everyones different ad placement preferences into the software should not be forced upon the devs...it takes you 10 seconds to figure out how to add a custom spot so leave them to the important stuff and sort out your own (unique) ads pots ;)
 
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