Any use starting a new forum?

Id say go for it.
Start up costs are kinda zero and you´ll see where you end up

Depends on where you live... but in general I'd think the effort vs reward would not be worth it. I could be wrong.

i agree with jens, what have you got to loose? go for it

Depends, find a good niche and go with it

Probably not unless you already have good amount of targetted traffic and/or feel your forum will offer something the others aren't.

Biggest cost of running a forum is time and hassle ... dealing with problem users, spammers, control freaks, recruiting mods, etc.

Add on top of that the costs of hosting, if planning to run a vBulletin forum, which uses a lot of server resources and requires a lot of maintenance to keep updated and secure...

And even that's no gurantee - many vBulletin forum operators running the latest version have been forced to turn new registrations off or spend a lot of time reviewing each one - see details at vBulletin support forum. And there are more threads about the issue on other sites.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1631469

Bottom line is unless your proposed forums are going to offer something substantially different than the current ones, it's likely not worth the bother; ad click-through rates on forums is the pits.

Perhaps consider a blog that allows some limited user interaction as an alternative.

Ron

if you have something new and good marketing skills go for it. develop a website/portal to go with it.

Go for it.

there are thousand of forums, but only few are worth to checkout, so if you know what are you doing, you can have success anytime wish you luck with it

If you know how to promote it, it's worth it.

I just opened one, sure why not.

Running forums has turned into a full-time baby sitting job for me. It pays off though. phpBB3 is a godsend.