speaking from my previous experience:
projects like these require a lot of effort or even more investment when you start
you have to be able to write exclusive,up to date content or give enough incentitive to people to do that for you
i.e. community creation is a very hard task given the exisiting competiton
*gonna check the forum out anyways
Actually new forums have to give users some incentive for doing work, because no ways you can expect a new user to join your forum leaving old forums without any personal interest. Once the forum goes good the admins stop paying money for the posts, its not a bad idea in my opinion.