I disagree with his assumption that these forums, let alone every forum of similar size, earn enough to "make a living" from. Forums are notoriously hard to monetize, and traffic at those levels is likely to bring in at most a few hundred a month in advertising and affiliate revenue. That's not enough for a young single guy to live off, let alone a family.
It's true that forums are hard to monetize with Adsense and other affiliate ads, but they're definitely not impossible to monetize.
I started/ran silverfishlongboarding.com for a few years and the forums became very popular. Even so, it never made more than a couple hundred a month off Adsense.
Eventually we got rid of Adsense and started selling ads directly. Within a few months we were bringing in several thousand a month. It was much more time consuming, but it worked. I sold the site a couple years ago, but I keep in touch with the new owners and I know that at least one of them is making a living full time off it.
Wow, I used to surf the 'fish a good bit last year. Got hooked up with the Friday Night Rip at Prospect Park with the Earthwing and Bustin crews, bought a Kracked Skulls M1; my roommate bought an Original Apex. It's still a great site with a valuable community. Nice work!
Actually, I clearly stated that I don't know how much these forums are making, but I don't think that's the point. Yes, forums are hard to monetize, but in my opinion, these forums have clearly demonstrated that there's an audience for the niches in question. There are almost certainly better ways to monetize that audience (blog with sponsorship, ecommerce, membership site, etc).
There's a world of difference between "there's an audience, and somebody might be able to find an effective way to extract cash from that audience" and "If You’re Passionate About Something, You Can Make a Living From It Online".
Remember when the dot-com bubble burst? The fallout was littered with sites that had audiences, but no effective means of monetizing.
The bubble companies had no intention to monetise their audience. The very phrase 'burn rate' is indicative of why it was a bubble. Their plan was simply to grow audience, even at a big loss, buoyed up by huge valuations and ridiculous IPOs.
Most of the dot-com failures were just straight out bad businesses, making a loss on each unit but making up for it in volume. Pets.com is the obvious example, selling cases of dog food at a loss because the shipping cost more than the dog food. The common theme of the dot-com failures was the desire to grow as big as possible as fast as possible, regardless of everything else.
A niche audience is completely different to a mass audience. They are inherently valuable by merit of being a niche. A list of pet owners isn't worth very much, but a list of people who own German Shepherds with arthritis is. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has ever sold anything. Just the list of names is worth proper money, let alone the community and the goodwill and trust that it carries.
In the ever ending question to find Product/Market Fit having a successful forum can easily help someone identify the market portion of the equation. What MVP could you build for a group of jacket loving film peeps?
Hook up with a leather shop and sell custom-fit versions of famous leather jackets. Sell patterns.
You probably aren't going to find a homerun scalable business model, but there are dozens of sustainable small businesses that could be built on such a base.
Hell, it's jackets that were in movies right? Don't netflix, amazon and apple allow for affiliate links to the movie? Depending on the traffic that could add up.
