Do not think for a minute that the moderators haven't discussed the prospect of banner ads or member subscriptions in order to raise some money to cover the costs. There are several problems with either strategy.
If we are to have one or more banner ads, we have to approach the companies involved with some kind of business plan and also a contract, they would have to pay us a certain (probably very small) amount of money to simply have the advert there and then we'd get a certain amount for each referral click. Here are some of the problems:
1. Standard banner ads are huge, we'd either have to lose some serious space to them or make the clients use really tiny ones, which means less money.
2. We'd have to stop any commercial members. If you work for a company and want to sell something your company offers through the forum at a good price, you'd not be able to. Imagine how cross you'd be if you were paying to advertise on a website and yet some companies get free advertising right in the middle of the forum threads! Some of our members provide some good deals with us and I'm afraid if we'd want to keep our banner ads we'd have to prevent them from offering through the forum.
3. Like it or not it would probably drive some members away or prevent some people from ever signing up, which naturally we don't want.
4. According to Maff (@ poundhost) there have been practically zero referrals through the "powered by" logo at the top of the page. In order for banner ads to work, people will actually have to visit those sites that are being advertised. I don't think I've ever found myself clicking on an advert on a forum and I think I'm in the majority when I say that!
What we *could* do is have sponsored forum sections. For example if we had a tyre shop OWN the wheel/tyre section then they could offer some good deals through the forum and pay us for the privilege of it carrying their name. This sounds cheap and americanised "the WHOEVER TYRES wheel/tyre forum" or the "wheel/tyre forum sponsored by WHOEVER TYRES" but having a business partner like that could be very useful for both us and the tyre shop, give them a forum presence and they can answer wheel/tyre questions, these would naturally be biased towards a sale but then so many threads have companies listed in them that they would be pressed to offer a very good deal. I think there could be a future in that kind of strategy.
