Usually there are a few different ways people make money with their forums. I would say that Google Adsense would be one of the big things that people like to rely on. But, there are problems with it. You would think that forums that have many viewers and thousands of impressions a day would make a very high amount from programs like Adsense. This is not fully the case.

What happens is the viewers just get way to used to the adsense advertisement and after a while will just skip over them. Once that happens that person will no longer click the ads. That is where you have a problem.

Now there is a way that you can kind of keep your viewers to view the ads more often. If you are using text based ads then you can use the multiple pallets option when you are designing your ad. The slight difference in the screen makes the eyes notice what has changed and thus brings the eyes to your ad.

Next you can be creative where you place the rest of the Adsense ads. A good place to insert the ads is under the thread area which is what most of the people see. If you want put 2 leaderboard sized ads one on top of the other. That is what a good portion of my forum admin friends do, not to mention digitalpoint forums.

A nice little tip is to not use the link ads from adsense. They usually are no good and will just take up space on your forum.

Make more by using Adbrite with Adsense-

Well Adsense, even with great placement and color optimization, can only bring in so much money. The next thing to do is use other ad networks to bring money in.

The footer - The footer can’t make you to much money with Adsense. Mainly because people don’t really look down there very often. But, it still has potential to make you some money. For this you can use Adbrite.


Adbrite is used mainly for making money via CPM ads. That, is a forum owners best friend. The CPM ads are great, just place them in your footer. Then you could be earning a decent amount for your traffic with these ads, and many of your viewers will not even notice them. A win-win situation.

Next you can try to pry even more money with it. Adbrite offers you the chance to place full page ads on the page that pay out pretty well. You can choose to have them show up once every 24 hours for each unique IP. The full page ads sometimes pay up to a penny per view. Which is pretty great. Especially if you have a great many guests on your site. But, if this is optional and some people don’t like the idea. I say if you are planning on trying it, think of your guests. Place yourself in their shoes and picture how you would react to the full page ads. Then weigh the reaction with how much potential money their is to gain.

Do Not place inline ads on your site. It disorients the members and almost every time, makes them leave your forum. Also, the inline ads from most programs are not that closely content oriented and you will get ads that have nothing to do with your content. Not very good when you consider that inline ads are all CPC based.