Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
There are several instances of large companies acquiring forums. And it's not just this alleged Vertical Scope company in Canada. From my personal experience (as a user, not mod or administrator, on two such forums that were acquired) the forums end up being trashed by the company that does the acquiring. The forums are still there in name and remain accessible, but all the long time members leave. Post counts drop to nothing. I'm not sure what business model is being followed by the companies that are doing this, as buying something and then destroying it seems counterproductive. My hunch is that it is political or agenda driven rather than profit driven. If my hunch is correct, Mobileread might slip out of the noose since there's not much someone with an agenda could have against book enthusiasts (maybe I'm wrong).
The problem may come by indirect association though. And example from here in the US: The company REI stopped selling CamelBak products (they make backpack hydration bladders so you can drink on the move while hiking). Who could be against that, and why would REI do such a thing? It's because CamelBak is owned by a company, that is owned by a company, that has some subsidiary, that owns a company, that sells firearms. And REI wants to engage in Virtue Signaling against firearms. So poor CamelBak is caught up in REI's idiocy. There is no business reason that REI might have done this, they don't sell firearms, but they have an agenda against them and trashed CamelBak in the process.
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1- Vertical Scope is owned by Torstar. Of Harlequin self-dealing infamy. Which is one reason the authors on the forum are riled up.
2- There *is* a business model behind the move and it doesn't require new posts. The value is in the existing posts (the more the merrier) and the keywords used in the posts that will surface in Google/Bing/DuckDuck/etc searches, capturing eyeballs for related ads they will attach to the pages.
(Rather like google adwords:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords)
For example, in a thread about editing conventions (say Oxford comma wars) they can attach ads for one of the covert Author Solutions feeders. And that is just one reason Mobilereads is a potential target. Theoretically, anyway.
3- They have already bought a bunch of narrow focus sites (hence the "Vertical" in the name) and have been raking in good money off the search engine hits. Think of a website devoted to historical gun designs--muskets, pin guns, palm guns, etc--serving as a feeder for both assault rifle and gun control ads. As long as the purchased text is relevant enough to the subject to honestly surface in queries it can generate income. It's a bulk business producing small per-page view income but by capturing eyeballs by the zillion it adds up to big money.
4- Of course, to monetize the posts they bought, they have to keep the content in place. It won't do them any good if every contributor goes back and "edits" all their posts into blank pages. So their TOS has to claim ownership so they can archive the state of the site and keep that frozen version in the path of the search engines.
This is just another example of the internet dictum: "If you're not the paying customer, you *are* the product."