I would think that the goal of every site owner is to have their phpbb board grow. And grow. And grow. Afterall, who starts out a board saying to themselves, “Gee, I hope I only get about twenty members in the next year, and have only about 5 posts.” I don’t think so. Now unless you are independently wealthy (I am available for adoption, if so) you need funds to cover your board’s operating costs. Bandwidth is not free, and good hosting is not cheap. So what do you do?

Many board owners turn to advertising. That, in turn, presents an entirely new set of questions.

First, will you turn your users away if you include advertising on your board?
Second, do you have something that an advertiser will be interested in?
Third, do you have the tools in place to manage your advertising?
Fourth,….

There are probably lots of issues related to advertising, but these are the first ones I would like to offer some thoughts on. My thoughts are based on several boards that I own, manage, or just visit. Some use advertising, others do not.

Keeping your Users

A site based around a phpBB board is typicall more about community than anything else. Afterall, that’s the tagline from the phpBB group, “Creating Communities,” right? So without users there really isn’t much of a community to build on. Therefore I think it’s important to consider the user experience before adding any advertising to your board.

There was one board that I used to visit that - in my opinion - went majorly overboard with the advertising. There were banner ads on the top of every screen. There were skyscraper ads down the sides of pages. There were ads in between posts. There were even advertisements that were cunningly disguised as topics so that I would click on them by mistake.

In my opinion, these were bad decisions. If you make the advertisements overly intrusive, they ruin the user experience. It becomes more difficult to find the content because of the advertisements. And I believe that disguising the advertisements so that they look like standard forum content was a horrible decision. They lost me as a user, and I can’t imagine that I am unique. (Before anyone asks, I will not reveal the URL for this board.)

I own one board that just recently went over the five year mark. I am quite proud of that accomplishment. We went the first two and a half years without any advertising at all. However, the reality was that we needed a bigger server. We started on a shared hosting account, then moved to a small dedicated server, but ultimately we needed more. When I priced out servers the best deal I could find was about $200 a month. Many hosts were even more. That meant it was time to consider advertising. I decided to start with a very simple approach. I would create a single banner position at the top of the screen. I felt that this would be a good compromise between having advertising at all, and the requirement to fund the server.

Involve Your Community

But before I did anything, I talked to the community. I started a topic that detailed the growth in both members and posting activity. I shared statistics that clearly showed that we were outgrowing our server. And I disclosed the fact that t-shirt revenues in the prior year had only covered about 70% of the total server costs, even on our smaller server. What was I trying to accomplish?

I was trying to make sure that the community knew why I was taking the step of adding on sponsors. Oh, and that was another thing… we don’t have “advertisers” we have “sponsors” instead. It’s a minor point of semantics, but I felt like it was an important distinction to make. By involving the community in the decision to allow banner advertisers, er, excuse me, banner sponsors ;-), they were investing in the same decision that I was. It wasn’t me as the board admin deciding to inflict advertising on the board, it was the community as a whole recognizing the need and accepting the solution.

Our Results

We’ve gone another two and a half years since then with continued growth. Obviously something is working right. We are still using the same server that we switched to when we started the sponsorships, and still have room to grow.

What would I have done if the community had voted down the idea of sponsors? My options were limited, so I am very happy that things worked out the way they did.

Having Something to Advertise

In the next post in this series I plan to offer some thoughts on whether advertising will even work on your board. Afterall, advertisers are not looking for charity cases, they want to get something in return. If you don’t have anything worth advertising, what are your options? My thoughts on that next time.