Relationship between daily forum visits and number of "active" members

[jshort]

I've noticed that adding a forum to one's affiliate site is very common. Is it possible to even quantify the value that a good/active forum can have to one's site revenue?

I've thought about what it would take to create an active forum. How do you create a successful community? To be more specific, how do you create a forum that can get 10,000s of visits per day?

I believe the answer to the above depends on many factors, but I think the biggest factor is how many "active/involved" members are currently using the site (by "involved", I mean people who answer others poster's questions, post useful and interesting forum post etc).

I've got a theory/conjecture:

Let N = number of total forum visits per day

Let A = number of active/useful users involved on the forum.

I conjecture that A = square-root(N) .

A verbal interpretation of the above would be to say that the number of forum visits per day, requires considerably fewer active members. For example, having 100 visits per day, may only require 10 active members. Having 10,000 visits per day would require only 100 active members...........and 1,000,000 visits per day would require 1,000 active users!

Any thoughts?

 

[hedgehok]

N = A² might be a little too simplistic but the general concept that the total amount of site visits is exponential to the amount of active members seems to be correct because of two reasons.

1) The active members visit the site more often with an increasing amount of activity (reply more often to each other, monitoring the forum is a "bigger" task and requires a higher amount of daily visits).
2) I presume that the amount of lurkers will also grow exponentially with an increasing amount of activity, at least from/to a certain point of active members.

 

[petro]

I've thought about what it would take to create an active forum.

This might be slightly out of context but I think a forum must be of some practical use to it's members.
Here on CM you can; PAB, get exclusive promos, get helpful advice from members, and so on.
The PAB service is the most useful to my mind.

 

[Simmo!]

Many years ago I tried a forum and discovered several things. Firstly, it is very, very time consuming to support and get going. You tend to attract a lot of spammers, shills, marketers and people who feel your forum has been provided for them to say what they want. You can weed out the chaff but it takes time and is very frustrating. I personally felt my time was way better spent providing useful information.

It takes an age to build up anything good and monetising a forum is very hard. You need to operate services (as others above suggest) and provide a reason for people to want to play. Bringing them to engage in conversation alone is not enough.

All that said, if you can spare the time to moderate and run it properly and provide information that make players feel they can trust you then it's a great way of building a brand. But there are lots of hurdles and pitfalls and you have to be thick-skinned, not afraid to piss people off and make sure you end up with a sensible and interesting mix of people if you want to build a truly valuable player forum.

A side-note: you can get a lot of people in but if you moderate ineffectively and end up with a lot of confrontational/aggressive/rude/useless posts, that will put off truly valuable posters posting and you're forum will end up being more trouble than it is worth.