07-31-2023, 03:24 PM
(07-31-2023, 02:08 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: To put it another way, substantially all of the value of the forum is in the intangible value of the community to its participants. It’s not like a factory on a valuable plot of land which can be shut down and sold in pieces (and where this might actually be good, on the whole — for a factory employing a small number of workers on prime real estate to shut down in favour of residential space for many more people is an overall good, even if can be bad for the former employees). In order to extract money value, somebody has to loan money and then lose it.
In this particular scenario (I knew some of the people whose forums were acquired) Verticalscope was essentially trying to build a community of onlive communities, big enough that they would be able to leverage all those eyeballs for advertising revenue. Individual forums have a great deal of difficulty securing decent advertising rates, and the idea was to have enough size to secure better rates--and make the forums profitable.
As far as I know, there were no financial shenanigans involved in this case, maybe just unrealistic expectations and projections.