ResetEra has been sold for $4.55m. The owner made $700k in the last 12 months.

Pepelepew

Active member
Looks like a forum that has been open since 2017 has been sold for 4.5 million dollars! thats pretty insane. and they made 700K a year. Do you think u ca own a forum like that? Joyfreak is a gaming forum I think they can do it

 
Looks like a forum that has been open since 2017 has been sold for 4.5 million dollars! thats pretty insane. and they made 700K a year. Do you think u ca own a forum like that? Joyfreak is a gaming forum I think they can do it


The leadership team works quite hard over there and built a fantastic community. They deserve their success and show what can happen to companies that put their community first.

They didn't build a thing. The site was essentially a mass exodus from NeoGAF in 2017 after the owner there was #Metoo'ed and people were looking for a new venue. Cerium either had the wits or (more likely) had been planning a breakaway forum for a while and managed to catch the wave of discontent in large part because he stunt cast a whole host of big-name GAF posters to moderator roles to lure various groups in. NeoGAF in its heyday was usually averaging around 5-6K members online (even more when it was a tentpole event like E3). 3.5-4.3K including visitors is a notable drop off in terms of site traffic.

Albeit the site definitely got boosted up some in terms of profile by the gaming press frequently namechecking it, its actually been in decline for a while in terms of its global ranking: -


Some people will claim that Reddit and Twitter have made gaming forums obsolete to explain it, but the brute reality is the moderation at ERA is largely viewed as a joke in gaming circles because they're highly politically charged and are constantly banning people for perceived "wrong think" on all manner of topics, and have essentially been culling the inherited membership for years, or just driving people away. The stunt casting of big-name GAF posters to the moderation team backfired because the people most ill-suited to actually moderate a forum are the ones who spend every living breathing second on forums. They generally can't see the wood for the trees, and usually have a tonne of baggage and beefs with other members and needless to say, they then set the moderation culture, which pretty much revolves around leveraging 'opinions I disagree with' into a bannable offence under the guise of 'Hate Speech' etc. Dictation rather than moderation.

The new owners have made great play about how they're not going to interfere with the running of the site, but if they intend to turn the site around and look to recoup their investment they're invariably put their own moderation team in charge at some point because the present moderation team aren't fit for purpose in the long run.
 
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The new owners have made great play about how they're not going to interfere with the running of the site, but if they intend to turn the site around and look to recoup their investment they're invariably put their own moderation team in charge at some point because the present moderation team aren't fit for purpose in the long run.
Just have a look at the history of gulli.com . Built over years with millions of members, driven by enthuasm. Ruined by the buyer within months. Now dead and closed. And somehow the domain made it back to gulli and is now waiting to become something like a money printing machine.

The idea, the ecosystem of that particular userbase and the most important, the spirit, is lost forever. And this is repeating itself whenever stakeholders or investors come into play.

But you don´t have to google for the german gulli.com. Another EN_US example should be lurking around in the back of your minds. Even though it isn´t exactly compareable 1on1. Anyone ever heard of InternetBrands or a completely insignificant piece of software called "vbulletin"? ;)

#1001bugs
 
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