I worked in forums for 4 years. It is the worst most unprofitable business you can get into. The best you can do is show low quality ads or use crappy affilia

I worked in forums for 4 years. It is the worst most unprofitable business you can get into. The best you can do is show low quality ads or use crappy affiliate programs. The more ads used the less the users like the forum. Forum users love being anonymous. So you provide no value to advertisers that want age,sex,location. Advertisers also HATE forums due to their ad being shown on user generated content. Drama: There are always personal attacks on moderators, posting of illegal material, threats, police involvement and constant human curation. If you build centralized forum software every forum owner works day and night to use something cheaper and get away from your control. Don't even bother offering host your own software (non centralized). "OH i know React I can build a vBulletin clone." No. No you cannot. vBulletin has been working on this software for 20 years and they offer it for $300.