Many times i think that which one is more profitable for a webmaster to start and make money through adsense or other measures.Are they blogs or the forums which are more profitable and provides best solutions for earning monetary benefits.

So here i try to find out the pros and cons of both of them.

Forums

Plus points

Faster and better rankings in search engines specially if you are using vBulletin and the similar products.They have better categorization ability and people can contribute to them easily.You don’t have to post as a admin everyday.Just have to keep an eye on it for avoiding spams.

People can have conversation easily and they can contact each others.They can debate on a issue post threads and posts which becomes it self a page which help website keep growing very fast.

If you are good at coding and understand some amount of seo then your forum can stand really high with different keywords in search engines.

There are various types of free as well as paid solutions for forum software and so you don’t have to worry much about them.There are plugins also available which allows you to put adsense and other ads into posts and threads easily.

Negatives

Not a simple task to edit things.Specially with templates section.
People when visit the forum they see the ads as ads rather than the content so if you are not good enough in blending those ads then it is sure that you might  not be able to get more out of it.

Making members is a tough task.If we compare it with blog where the admin can post what he/she likes members post in it and for this there must be done something to promote it.Alone admin cannot do anything which makes it really tough to run it.

Placing ads is quite  a trajectory in it.You have to learn to ABC of software and how it works.How to upload plugins etc.Then people spams a lot on forums.

Where do i place ads on forums

Examples are look at the websites forums.digitalpoint.com

this is the format suggested by google for forums

Like most sites, forums can benefit from opting in to image ads. Supporting image ads increases the pool of ads – particularly cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ads – bidding to display on your site. Since forums tend to have lower clickthrough rates than other types of sites, CPM ads can improve revenue without the need for clicks. Keep in mind, however, that CPM ads come in both text and image formats.

Blogs

Plus points

Faster,easier and safer .. i think anybody can blog they can start posting easily without much difficulties.That is why everyday thousands of new blogs come on  internet.Search engines also like blog but it should fulfill some conditions like should have some decent history i mean the older blog stands good in results.Then you should have atleast 50 posts on it.Properly using hte various plugins and images can make the blog an money making machine.You can start it free with blogspot,wordpress and other places.

Negatives

You have to post a lot and frequently with real good content to attract the web readers.Blogs are really difficult to maintain you have to post fresh content every now and then to remain updated in the market and so that people get the fresh content whenever they visit it.

Adsense can be implemented easily.Templates are available on Internet many of them are free.Less technical complex as compared to the forum.Bloggers can easily try different ad formats.Google suggests to choose a bold color for the ad title to help draw attention to your ads.It also suggest that you should make sure that the background and borders of your ads are the same color as the background of the area where the ad is placed.

Places to place ads on blog

you can also try the adsense for search by properly blending it.

Blogs CTR is good as compared to forums which makes more money with less visitors.

So what is conclusion

I think both are good but for money making purpose it seems like blogs have got a upper hand but you cannot underestimate forum power as you can see the example of forums.digitalpoint.com and many others who are many many dollars every year through it.