How to start a forum if the market is already saturated?
 

Hi

How to start a forum if the market is already saturated for that niche with 1 or 2 big players?

So for example lets say we got gfy and xyz as main players for porn, then if I start a forum no one will post on it.

Thanks

B

Lots of posting / fake members... make the forum appear active and that a community already exists, people are sheep.

Look up the story on how reddit.com started

The 2 founders created a ton of fake accounts and posted to make the appear the site was active. Nobody will post on a dead forum.

yes, and contest on dp

start niche forum

Yeah, figure out a niche within the main market.

Hire some monkeys to post their asses off, particularly focusing on discussing current news within the market. You can get some for as low as 10c/post.

Run some contests. Give away Amazon gift cards or whatever applies to your market. You can even offer free advertising on the forum as prizes.

If you need more ideas, PM me. I have a ton which I won't post here. :)

Unfortunately even much lower :)

if it is saturated that's a bad idea...

If you have any leads where I can get posters at those rates, please let me know. And will they jus post mindless crap, or will it actually make sense?

There used to be a mainstream webmaster board which had a lot of forum owners post g on it. They had a pretty cool system in place to help jump start new forums. They had a pool of webmasters whom would post to each others forums and once you reached X amount of posts on one of the approved new forums, you could then get your forum approved.

The only problem was that system only worked for general type stuff that wasn't too niche, because the niche forums never did well due to it often being obvious the posters didn't understand the niche. I can't remember the site, but it used to be a fairly popular webmaster forum. Not like gfy or dp but active enough.. it's probably around d still and you could likely find it via Google with some creative searching.

So true

Correct

Agree or create a few niche sub forum categories

Depends on the quality and quantity of the messages being posted.
.05 to .25c a post, and as little as .01 to .02c a word.

Craigslist, DP, here on GFY. There are tons of people offering up their writing skills.


One additional piece of advice, if you have a large enough lead list for whom you would like to see join your forum, consider it an "invite only" in the beginning. Everyone loves the idea of feeling special, and then assumes the room is thinner, because this is only open to smaller "members" group only. Make sense?

Got link?

everything is saturated already, still not a reason to not create something you want. Wasn't there a lot of mom and pop hardware stores, never stopped home depot

The question to yourself should be do you really want to make the forum, perhaps what the purpose will be.

Lots of fake drama, ban a fake poster once a week and announce it to everyone, have big fights between the fake posters (be nice to the real posters), make sure you regularly post quality replies to the real posters, allow sigs

If I was starting a porn forum I would pay well known people to post among my fake accounts and outsourced posters. If the content seems interesting then people will join in.

Starting a forum is a little tricky. You need to enforce the rules to keep your content on-target but at the same time, allowing people to post what they want to post can help increase viewership and return visits. You also want to cater to a large number of topics but too many different areas will spread your content out too thinly making it look quiet.

Start your forum definitely, but consider :

- Starting with 2 general threads only. An "Adult Business" thread, and a "General" thread.

- Try to boost interesting, relevant, topics and don't be shy to start your own. Important topics attract people and invite commentary.

- Keep the spammers out.

- Let people say what they want but be ready to put the breaks on if you think things get out of control.

- Offer to let people promote their own sites in exchange for them promoting yours or attracting new users to your site in a nice, non spammy way.

- Stick with it. It may take a while but if you keep your site's content on target, others will begin to visit it and appreciate your efforts more.

Just my two cents.

Good luck!

I have a "seeder" bot that I've used for a decade to start new forums. It makes accounts (some with sigs, some with personalities, etc), then those accounts talk to each other, making it look populated. I demonstrated it a while back (way far back) for people here.

Found it: https://gfy.com/fucking-around-and-pr...a-testers.html

For that price, it would most likely be mindless crap.... I wouldnt mind having some deep conversations with myself for a bit higher though. Just shoot me an email in case you want to talk about it.

And to stay in topic; apart from having fake accounts populate it, which always works - prizes: an idea would be to have a sort of rotating ads scrips (even a little button). These little buttons would come from (real) posters who can maintain a certain post count every month. Everyone wants a good link, and will end up posting at least to have it kept in there.

10c/post sounds reasonable for what your asking.. just be sure to pay them unlike the guy down below :disgust

I always pay the people to whom I outsource work. :)

:thumbsup:pimp

I'm interested in this.
How does it work and can it be used with a phpbb forum? (oh and is it idiot proof? Because I don't know jack-shit about programming)

That post was from 2007. Chio ran away with all of the money, as well as the code. I have just been using a script version of it I recreated (no UI, etc). If enough people were interested, I'd slap an admin UI on it and sell it. :thumbsup

Looks like the market isn't receptive to it, but if I'm wrong, I'll happily re-build it. What model would you guys prefer: pay once (higher), or pay over time (monthly, very affordable)?