Imagine that I have a magic parser that can parse discussion forums like this one and save this data in a huge DB in a structured way. It means there will be tables: forum, subject, post, etc., populated with data from forums. So I will have a kind of global storage of structured forum data.

Now the question is how can I use it? Is there a way to earn money on this?

Here are some ideas:
1) a web site that allows users to browse information from hundreds of forums in one place in a unified way
2) set up a service that allows to subscribe updates from different forums at once.
3) just provide access to this database for other 3-d party companies or webmasters, SEO specialists.... will anyone need this?

Most of all I am curious about the last options...

What else?

Thank you.

You may just be a little late to the market with that idea

www.feedburner.com

It's not exactly what I am talking about.
Not all forums support RSS format. Actually many-many of them don't support it. RSS reader that I saw shows only new topics, but not new posts.

topix.com feedzilla.com

Guys, can you find posts from this forum at topix.com feedzilla.com feedburner.com??? NO
I am talking about agregation of discussion forums like this one. Not RSS, not news feed. My magic parser would parse forums not using RSS.

feedburner is NOT forum aggregator, it is tool that people USE to subscribe to forums.

And BTW RSS or XML feeds are the only realistic means to gather the data from disparate forum, as it is a standard format.

No forum operator is going to give you or any other third party direct access to their database.
"scraping pages" and extracting the pertinent data would be an impossible task as it would have to cope with every design that particular operator came up with.

chrishirst,

There are several off-line forum readers which successfully parse different forums, for example Forum Pilot. But that's not the point. I am not talking about implementation. I am wondering how can use a database that contains forms content in structured form.

and how to monetize it???

RSS doesn't count - it's not supported by all forums and it doesn't provide enough information to create DB that I am thinking of.

The majority of forums have problems with earning revenue from their own content.

But the answer is amazingly simple, ...






...

You make the content immensely popular then sell products or advertising.

chrishirst,

simple? hm...

You mean that I can create a web site that allows users to browse information from different forums in an unified form. Then make it popular and sell advertising?

Then make it popular and sell advertising

That's the time consuming bit.
Two or three years of promotion, advertising and getting over the duplicate content filtering in search engine and you might be getting enough traffic to make it worth placing adverts.

Two or three years of promotion are too much in my opinion , go with advertising and getting over the duplicate content filtering in search engine (excellent SEO) you will get enough traffic 4 yours