What is the expected growth rate of a community?

[ephemeral]

What is the expected growth rate of a community?

What I mean by this, is how many posts / members should I aim for after, 2 months, 6 months, a year...5 years.

Right now I am at approx 1400 posts after 2 months.

Is this better than average? Worse then average?

How far along should I be after a year?  

[Kindred]

it really depends on your site...

a) Does your site encompass a wide range of topics or is it dedicated to a specific niche?
b) if a niche, does this niche has a following?
c) What have you done to attract new members?
d) etc etc etc...

there really is no "expected growth rate"

[Peter Duggan]

Since any meaningful answers to your questions depend on so many factors, I'm basically going to answer by posing some more questions of my own:

Are you providing something because you want to or because you've identified an obvious need for it?
Does your forum deal with a popular subject or something more obscure?
Are you competing with other similar (possibly established) forums or offering something unique?
How actively is your forum promoted?
How long is a piece of string?

See, there are no 'one size fits all' answers here!

PS I did start composing this response before Kindred posted his.

[tsmalmbe]

Just for comparison:

- 1 month, 12k posts 300+ users.
- niche
- competing with other
- non-english language (limits potential users)
- mouth-to-mouth promotion

[ephemeral]

Nice, and you got that many posts in just one mouth? How did it spread by mouth?

[tsmalmbe]

Sperading the word was quite simple, we knew there was a big group of unsatisfied users on other forums. So, without any active marketing, just letting a few of the closest now there was an alternative forum (ours), the word spread form one user to the other.

So, we had an actual demand out there, which made it easier to get the users to come to us.

[Harro]

There is no expected growth of a forum.
Some reach thousands of posts and a few hundred members in just a couple weeks, while it could take months (or even  more) for other forums.

My personal opinion is that 1400 posts after 2 months isn't really bad.
How many members do you have though? And how many posts out of those 1400 did you make?

[Deaks]

When he forum i first work on was bought iver and converted to smf in a month we had

New Posts = 1557
New Members = 25

Now almost a year later we are at

New posts = 6707
New Members = 58     

in almost a year our average:

Monthly New Posts = 6510
Monthly New Members = 80

The stats from the forum im on doesnt include amount that havent returned, since registering, for me I think key to our numbers is the fact the forum even though is based on one "religion" we are open to all religions, and we offer alot of varied opinions on questions asked.  Also we dont do alot of advertising, our hits are from search results and word of mouth.

But give it time honestly from my view your forum is doing well, look at your stats further down the line then you can decide.

[ephemeral]

Monthly New Posts = 6510

6,510 per month, egh? That's pretty awesome...

That's over 200 posts per day.  

[Deaks]

yeh, assuming the average month is 31 days then it makes 210 per day, and we want more

for us word of mouth and google are the biggest, we have a very small advertising, simply due to time and life restraints.

As I said previous best looking at your stats in few months and see if its improving after 1 month its kinda hard to say