This isn't a web hosting business question, but it's related in a way to it. So, here goes.

I'm sure most of you have heard of development communities for different programming languages and MMORPG games. What I'm wondering is this. Is it a good idea to start up a development community as a business? It would be primarily driven by advertisers buying ad space on the site and forums, which I know would require the site to be hugely popular for anyone to even consider it. But, I'm wondering if I should go for this.

My idea is to open up a MMORPG development community for different MMORPG games as well as other programming languages such as Java, C/C++, Perl, Python, etc and let it get popular and sell ad space to advertisers. Then get together a team of people and offer web and graphic services and other technology related services such as hosting, techincal support, etc.

Would this be a good idea or am I just out there in make believe land? I'm interested in starting something like this but I'm not sure how to go about it and all.

Opinions, thoughts?

Thanks,

Bryce.

Build the community first, you can worry about advertising once you have a good steady stream of traffic.

The number of similar sites is going to make it hard to get a sufficiently popular site. Even if/when you do, you won't get enough advertisers for it to be regarded as a business, not helped by the target audience, proportion of underage users I'd except on this type of forum and so forth.

Basically, to get to a stage where you can get a reasonable flow of revenue, you will need to put in too much time and effort to create an experience that will get the site up and running. I doubt it's worth it unless you have a big interest in the field and wouldn't mind being patient.