What happened to Soccerpulse?

What happened to Soccerpulse?

What happened to Soccerpulse?

Thats the question that is on the minds of thousands of web users who are wondering what exactly happened to the worlds biggest Football Forum dedicated to providing news, chat, media and scores. It happened only recently in October 2009, influenced slightly by the global financial crisis and the weakening of the keyword worth for Soccer.

How could a website with just over 100,000 members just vanish like that? To be honest I was personally shocked and a little surprised at the news. Deep down my feeling was that with so much traffic and members, the website would always survive due to the strong roots.

Looking back, what ended up happening is that soccerpulse was heavily reliant on adsense. Adsense was placed as a banner on every page and every new thread had adsense inside. It simply just wasnt enough.
What needs to be known, is that to run a big website with over 100,000 members, requires multiple and heavy servers. This is definitely not cheap and you can easily be parting away with 1-2 thousand dollars each month. From my experiencing of running footballclips.net I myself struggled in paying off rented servers, its just not easy each month when youve got a bill of $1,200 USD every month. Then when youre dedicating 4-5 hours a day, its not leaving much time to earn a living in the real world.

Now combine poor forum click rate with a diminished value of adsense keyword worth and youve got yourself a formula for disaster. The owner knew this and tried to experiment with paid registration. Which simply didnt work, due to the fact that the age demographics was mostly teenagers. Other factors would be the availability of similar websites.

Contextual Rollover Ads was tested, but this upset forum users, so that was squashed permanently. Desperate times call for desperate measure and the donation method was explored. I even donated myself. The donation method is like a cat with 5 lives, web users are just not going to have the energy to save the website after the 3rd time.

When adsense money was strong, what was needed was to use the adsense money more wisely, the profit should have been used to strengthen another division of the website that could produce revenue.
One of those techniques is to set up a shop; another would be selling online football tickets... Setting up partnerships with merchandising companies are other methods...

However your average 20 yr old kid isnt going to get far with his Adidas sneakers, ripped jeans walking into a boardroom with fat cats. To take advantage of the traffic, it needed someone with business credentials to approach these large corporations.

In the industry, its common knowledge that Forums generally have an atrocious record when it comes to clickable rates, which end up affecting the adsense clickable worth. Silently monitoring the site, I could see that the webmaster made attempts to put the focus on the main site, but enough wasnt done. The forum was always reverted to being the focus.
The status-quo of putting all of your eggs into one basket was used and in the end, the struggling webmaster could only do so much and take down the site...

If youre finding yourself in the same predicament, perhaps its time, that you re-evaluate your website and ask yourself, is your website bringing enough revenue to its full potential. Otherwise you might end up a memory, such as soccerpulse.com...