This news is a few days old but I’ve just found the time to sit and write about it today. In a recent announcement, Microsoft has ramped up its efforts to seal a deal to buy search engine Yahoo! in the wake of Google’s recent expansions. Google recently bought YouTube and DoubleClick, and its’ online advertising arena has exploded. Microsoft and Yahoo! re-entered years-old discussions for the buyout in order to gain market share on the Google giant.
Reuters reported that Yahoo shares jumped 14.6 percent to $32.20 on Friday, while Microsoft shares fell 1.4 percent to $30.53.
Time will only tell where this leads, but I for one think it’s going to be interesting to watch. Google has been exploding recently and leaving everyone else in the dust and it’s good to see some competition coming back into play here. Hey, that’s only fair, right?
It was inevitable, really, if you think about it. For years, Microsoft has been the center of antitrust and monopoly conversation around the world. People complain that their operating systems are too widespread, software is too tied in with Windows, documents made in Office need to be opened in Office, you name it, someone has complained about it. Now, it’s Google’s turn. Their recent announcement that they’ll purchase ad giant DoubleClick for $3.1 billion bucks has execs and lawyers at Microsoft up in arms. Their claim is that by purchasing DoubleClick, Google will now hold the key to important information about search AND about advertising - which will put them in a very positive (too positive?) position to corner the online advertising market. DoubleClick’s ad network would compliment their already existing AdWords / AdSense network which brings together advertisers and publishers for all types of websites, but the addition of DoubleClick would launch Google (in my opinion) into the “next level” of websites, meaning ad exposure on slightly larger and more “important” websites such as Ford and Vegas.com.
My take on all of this? Who cares. Google has the bucks to buy all of these companies. It happens in corporate America every day. The only reason that Microsoft is balking is because they are looking for someone else to point the finger at for a change. As long as Google doesn’t change DoubleClick to practice deceitful tactics in advertising based on back-end search analytics, I could care less. Sometimes people spend the most energy on the least important things in life. Honestly, if they’d save the money they’re paying their attorneys and use it towards something useful, the world might be a better place. It never ceases to amaze me how the big boys can never seem to stop fighting. Meanwhile, I just continue on my day to day business and have fun. Moral of the story: Sometimes is may just pay to be a little fish. Although at the moment it probably pays a little better to own GOOG stock.
For starters, for those of you who didn’t know, I have a couple of fairly successful forums. From time to time I get emails from people who just started a new forum and want to know how to make money from it. My answer is pretty much always the same so I might as well just write it once here and be done with it so I can just point them to this blog post whenever they ask me again. 
First things first. Ask yourself the following question: Am I starting this forum to earn a living? If the answer is yes, stop reading this post right now and don’t quit your day job. An EXTREMELY small percentage of all successful forums are making enough money to survive on. You need to have been doing it a long time and really have a business model together, as well as a busy niche with advertisers already lined up in order to even start thinking about this. On top of that, you’re going to need a busy forum and lots of traffic and lots of posts from lots of intelligent people (and preferrably from a demographic that likes to buy things online, hence the avenue for advertisers to pay you to be on your site hoping your surfers will buy their products).
If you really stop for a minute and think this through, you’ll realize that it’s a LOT harder than you originally thought to run a forum that brings you in the big bucks. Now, if you’re just looking to do it for fun and if you happen to make money off of it that’s great, that’s a different story. Now you can go follow the direction of all of the other people online who tell you to sign up for Google AdSense or YPN or AdBrite or any of those other companies. They do work, they do pay, and you can make a decent amount of money from a busy forum. I won’t go into lots of detail about these programs or what program is best for what kind of site because it’s been gone over about a million times on other sites.
So, to sum up this short blog post I’ll just say the following. To monetize your forum, you’ll really need the following:
- Traffic
- Traffic
- Traffic
- New posts
- Advertisers
Note lots of traffic comes first. Get the traffic and the rest will follow.
