I think the key is to experiment with everything – with your advertisers, with your placement, with the look of your ads etc etc etc. You can make money from an online community, it just takes effort.

Smiley – When Just Chat launched, it lost money for about two years. It was only when it became firmly established and was retaining visitors that it started making any decent revenue. You are already doing better than I was this early on in your site’s life.

I have real life debts, so I can’t just spend hundreds of pounds on advertising for my members out of my own pocket at the moment. I also need to build up to adding audio/video, I need an e-pals sytem.. plenty of things for me to work up to getting revenue to pay for, for my members.

I’ll probably change a couple of years down the line and want the profit then.

I could add voice/video out of my own pocket each month, but I have real life debts to sort!

Perhaps audio/video is something I should think about adding a year or so down the line, rather than this year. Launch it when I have good regular member numbers and stable revenue.

Do you have any suggestions of things to read for monetizing a community? or any recommendations from your own experience?

Smiley – Voice and video chat is very expensive and I struggle to see how you can offer it without charging users. Of course, you can’t charge users if your site doesn’t have a good number of chatters constantly in the room!

So I’m experimenting with paidonresults.com at the moment and thinking of ideas for revenue, as ChatBlazer charges £220 per month to add voice & video to the chat client.

I’ll have a gander and see if there’s any recurring commission available.