What Is The Future For The Humble Chat Forum?

So there definately is a future for forums but I'm interested in where they are going especially seeing as I have run an angling and fishing chat forum now for nearly 10 years. The potential is there and the revenues are growing all the time but there must come a tipping point in the not so distant future. If we are talking about the serious forums then most members create a profile, perhaps they include an avatar / photo and interact via social groups within their own forum. The point being that there is a massive gap between these topic specific forums and something like Facebook, FB would love to have the community feel that a properly run forum can achieve.

So what is the future? Personally I feel that individuals want to remain topic specific in their 'clans' or 'gangs' - 99% of my friends on Facebook dont even know I am well into fishing and angling (they may of course viewed my photo galleries) but they certainly don't want to have a chat about the finer points of fishing on a local river! More and more forums are allowing users to publicise there own products and offerings and to earn money through integrating adsense accounts - this encourages their users to post regularly and contribute meaningful content. I imagine we will see greater sharing of profiles between different applications with more networking and blogging all tied to a central personal space - so perhaps this is where FB etc see themselves in the future. Moderation is another issue though and it is almost impossible to police the web, everything is just out there and there must come a point where unmoderated or purely self moderated sites like FB suffer for it. Think for a moment how powerful a single site with access to all your online activity would be and you get an idea of how readily exec's at Facebook might be rubbing their hands together - . Think of Facebook groups as forums embedded into an social network and spin it the other way round when FB starts to suck in the activity from your other forum activity.

It cannot be long until we don't buy printed matter to read - we all know that this advertising channel is on its knees as most failed to embrace the online format and simply left it too late. People are not prepared to pay online for their content so income must now come from advertising revenue and there is only a limited amount to spead around! Forums are the future for targeted advertising and the newspapers know this - about time an angling publication came knocking on my door to buy into my platform me thinks! Now I can hear people laughing and saying 'get real' as we all know far from doing as they should these traditional publishers would rather say 'we know best' and attempt to start their own forums and blogs etc - 10 years late! Who knows where we will be in another 10 years but I am happy in the knowledge that I have my slice of the internet cake running a niche angling and fishing chat forum - is it just a case of waiting for the small fish to die out and a big whale gobbling me up.... we can only dream and stay one step ahead of the rest.

By: DVD and Media

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Simon Young Talk Angling Fishing