yeah I would pay.. but not much tho.. I think the people who ask something like $99 to list your site is a bit of a rip off..

Same here, I would pay but I would have to know what kind of advertising they were doing and where they were.

I use the google adwords and also clicksor to advertise my forum. I get a few clicks from them, but I dont know if it is genuie hits, or from people who run the google/clicksor ads on their site, and just trying to make money for themselfs by clicking the adverts.

Although my forums have mostly been built up by search engine listings and word of mouth I still believe paid promotion is an important piece of the puzzel, espcially for a new forum in the current market. Nearly every major forum niche has dozens of competing sites and growing requires traffic which generally means paying for some of your visitors. No forum should rely completely on piad traffic or even highly on it but it can be a helpful route to take.

I'd say it depends.

Do you intend to generate revenue with your forum, or is this just a "let's get together and be happy" community-type forum? That would be my determining factor on it-- if you intended to make some money off of it, I'd say it's worth investing at least a little bit of money.

and I do pay to advertise my two forums: UK Webmaster Forums - Webmaster Serve

Temi

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Yup, I would and I do.

Adwords is pretty good with the control you have over spending limits.

I've been using Google AdWords and I've gotten a lot of clicks but no new members.

My site is for fun. I don't make money on it so I have discontinued for now.

I use AdWords only to advertise DaniWeb ... but I am a big budget spender. I invest about half of whatever last month's gross profit was, so it grows each month Nothing ever comes out of pocket, so the site pays for itself. I have conversion tracking setup, and there is about a 5% conversion rate for new visitors registering on the forums