how do those webmaster earn money from those free forums?

recently there is a lot of creating of phpbb forums , i think using this sebflipper scripts..is it difficult to setup.. ? whats the cost involve?

how do the webmaster earn back the revenue?

Hello,
Advertising is one way. The more popular your community becomes the more banners you can have running across it.

Also linking to items that your forum is about may help.

I am not sure on your other questions because of have never used sebflipper scripts.

Originally posted by critical
. . . how do the webmaster earn back the revenue?
Well, that business model is all about building a delivery platform, whereby you offer free forums, and those folks provide you the platform to display your advertising etc. So there's the give and take, in the business equation.

Sounds good in theory but does it work? Yeah it can work, but can you get it to work for you? That's the $64 question. :)

Brinkster is one good example which turned around free hosting into a paid hosting .

i am quite interested in this business model ..and interested to know how much roughly such model of free forum can earn through advertising..do they go by pay per visit or pay per click type? and wats the cost of setting up such free forums and is lots of bandwidth needed

The cost of setting up is pretty small. You decide which forum or CMS you want to build your site around and get a small hosting plan to start with. As traffic grows and demands on the server get more, you upgrade.

The initail setup maybe cheap but it depends if you are able to do the install your self and the configuration.

With that in mind that costs will rise as the forum gets busier, you need to make sure you have planned things out correctly so that you have enough revenue to afford the upgrades.

I think it need alot of work to get such a forum to be lucrative business.

But if you for the beginning make it in your free time, and have some money to spend on it, it could work for you.

Advertising I suppose.

The forum also has to be on a subject that doesn't have another huge board about (aka WHT). You probibly will not get as big / bigger than WHT if you create a board on web hosting.