With executive compensation tied to EBITDA there will always be a manipulation of the numbers. If they do go private, hopefully their debt will be traded publicly so they will remain tied to Sarbanes-Oxley and thus under some scrutiny. Certainly would hate to see the shareholders end up like Enron or WorldCom. ...Les
The share holders are being bought off to go away. The offer price is way above what the stock has been trading at. I've owned one share since IB took over NAM as I wanted the annual reports delivered to my mailbox and for $6.75 it was a hella deal. Now I'll get $13.75 or something like that to sell it off to a private firm. This could be good for IB in the long run as then they are no longer tied to making quarterly numbers and could actually invest in themselves. However, with the yahoo's that run that place ...ha. As to "selling out", I still work with Mark Ferguson at Drive Thru Online, we write and sell some some of the features M/A has such as the Garage, Clubs, Vendor Tools and the ShowCase product that powers the Wheel and Badge Finders. IB promised a lot and delivered little when it came to selling NAM. We also work with the company that purchased MINI2. There again there was not supposed to be the changes seen, but when the grace periods expired on both...well now you see what happens. It's one of the things that pushed me to create M/A. I was on the IB dole as a contractor when I was the NAM Admin. It wasn't much, enough to keep me in a few sets of track tires a year. There was not much work to do either. Not sure if MotorOn was able to make a deal with them or not but I did tell him I was being paid before I left. There is a lot of money to be made with a really big forum, the adsense revenue alone just for the page impressions sites the size of NAM and MINI2 produce would pay a nice salary. Add in all the other revenue streams they have and well....it can be a pretty good income. Bundle up a few 100 of these and now your are talking economy of scale on the back end too. The sheer size and longevity of these sites make them stars in search results driving more new users to them all the time that have no idea and could care less about the past. So many have been conditioned to accept all the advertising on so many sites that they become blind to it. This is where a site like M/A fits in the niche and has a chance to be successful in a market that has become dominated by big players.
Well said. There are actually a few folks over at the sewing site who are working hard to try to preserve as much of the knowledge base and sense of community as they can. This is a bit easier to do on the less-product-sensitive topics (like detailing, "look at my new fuzzy dice!", etc) but is like paddling a canoe up a waterfall on the performance oriented threads. I've never had any issues with any of the mods at that site... but my style is a little more laid back than some. Except when I'm talking politics with Dr. O. Which I try to refrain from these days to keep my blood pressure down. :lol:
Would it be an insane amount of work to copy the "meat" of the tech threads into an archive somewhere and save them for posterity?
no but it would certainly be copyright infringement. when you post on a forum, you generally acknowledge that the post is no longer yours but the forum's (depends on the ToS but that's the norm).
IB gets worse...if you can believe it... The short version. Internet Brands purchased Jelsoft, the company that created vBulletin, the software this site uses. A lot of the original developers leave mostly because they don't want to leave their homes, friends and family in the UK for L.A. where IB moved the company too. IB drops the ball big time on the new vBulletin 4 in so many ways. Heck over 90% of their own sites incl the sewing one, don't run it. Fast forward to about 2 years after the purchase. The lead devs of the old Jelsoft come out with a new forum software that is head and shoulders above vBulletin in it's alpha release. They work at getting feedback and announce a beta sale. Get in early for a discounted rate. The day before the sale is to start IB throws down an injunction trying to cripple the small startup. IB posts the following on their site.... I really can't believe how crappy IB is acting in this manner. Compete on the merits of the product, not on how much longer you can last going after a startup. Even the owners of IPB, another commercial forum product have weighed in on how this is a such a low blow. I'm sorry to even be running vBulletin today and really hope the new guys can pull it off.
Some more about the suit... You just can't make this stuff up. Source XenForo-Rosenblum BTW, in case you did not know, Internet Brands owns "that other" site.
So lets say you have an internet media company and you decide to buy another site that has a Creative Commons policy meaning that all material is free to use elsewhere so long attribution is given. Say this site was a wiki, where people add information without compensation. Now lets say you as the media company decide to try and monetize the site by putting ads on a wiki type site. Lets also say that when you bought the site you promised to keep the software up to date, provide adequate servers to run the site and in general manage it properly. Now lets say that some of the contributors bail cause years down the road you as the media company did not live up to any of these promises. In our little tale some of those people create a fork of the site and move all the info over and you discuss this on the site. Well guess what, Internet Brands, the media company, is sueing... Read about in the NY Times. Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Its Owner Why do I bring this up? I think it shows the mindset of those that own the sewing site.
Suit has been settled. Internet Brands lost. Wikimedia and Internet Brands settle five-month lawsuit over new Wikivoyage site | The Verge
I have to say, their stewardship of any of the sites I belong(ed) to was less than stellar........in fact, they sucked! I understand the profit motive, and I don't have a problem with it, but when that drowns out the core reason for the site in the first place, something's wrong with management's approach. Ultimately, it's doomed to failure, IMHO. Either they will continue to not support it and it will wither and die on it's own, or they will overwhelm it with ads and people will get tired of fighting to get thru to the content, and it will wither and die. Or both......
IB loses another one... A few years ago a small startup made up of ex-vBulletin coders created Xenforo. IB sued them in both British (where they are located) and US (where IB is located) courts. IB tried to beat Xenforo down. They lost.
(Reuters) - Private equity firm KKR & Co LP said it would buy Internet Brands Inc, which operates CarsDirect and other websites, from private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity. A source familiar with the matter said the deal was worth about $1.1 billion. KKR, which owns the popular internet domain registration firm GoDaddy.com LLC, is looking to expand Internet Brands' services while focusing on business categories such as automobiles, health, legal, and home and travel. Full article http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/03/us-internetbrands-deals-kkr-idUSKBN0EE12V20140603