VerticalScope Inc Headed toward Bankruptcy?

[Forsaken]

I would appreciate an introduction to a VerticalScope team member. .. really curious how they run their forums. Do they attend any events? I’d probably fly halfway around the world to meet them at a business event or two.

It’s easy to criticize someone, and even easier to mismanage a forum you’ve purchased (I know how that feels). Their experience is invaluable.

Mismanaging every forum they have ever acquired, and driving away activity and people from successful communities to smaller ones is not something I would consider invaluable, other than learning from their mistakes.

By almost every metric (community, growth, income) they have never really been that successful, and their business has mostly been propped up by investments that are now gone or disappearing.

The sad reality is that taking over management of a community is very easy, and that is to not try to force what you think the community should be on to it. VerticalScope usually comes in and adds their Fora platform which not many people like, changes the monetization strategy very quickly (which makes no one happy) and forces new rules and management strategies. You cannot simply apply the same template to every community and expect them to succeed or remain successful, because each community has its own identity .

 

[Helmuts]

.. I don't anything about how they operate their business, and don't have opinion about them.

What I am sure of - they have a wealth of experience both good and painful. Super interested in this.

.. I own a niche forum (close to my heart - a forum for Latvian webmasters) that I bought in 2015 after it had been closed by the owner/founder for a while after trying to make it a blog-link-farm cashcow. .. still can't get it back on its feet + made tonnes of mistakes (1 of them > trying to run it on bbpress).. then, bought a dead forum last April - traffic and posts are coming back.. and, have almost tanked another forum by introducing too tight rules..

there are solo-owners who will almost never try anything new (you don't fix what isn't broken), and then there are owners who have 3-4 forums + passion for their industry and also try to run these forums as businesses (I am the 2nd one).

 

[Paul B]

IDK. I only have access to webmaster tools

Do you have permission to post this content publicly?

 

[Paul M]

I stepped quietly away from The Admin Zone (TAZ) sometime ago. I assume Vertical Scope still owns it but the last time I looked it was completely dead which is almost certainly due to a complete lack of management.

Not even been able to access it for the last week, maybe its finally died for good.

 

[ActorMike]

Not even been able to access it for the last week, maybe its finally died for good.

Sounds like you are banned because the site loads for me.

 

[Suzanne O]

Sounds like you are banned because the site loads for me.
View attachment 322462

Some of us are geo blocked from that site.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Not even been able to access it for the last week, maybe its finally died for good.

Unfortunately not, it's back up offering the world 'Cantilever Paper Slitting Machines for Seamless Paper Converting'

 

[Paul M]

Sounds like you are banned because the site loads for me.

Given I'm on the staff, thats rather unlikely.

Unfortunately not, it's back up offering the world 'Cantilever Paper Slitting Machines for Seamless Paper Converting'

Given the response, I investigated further.
It seems to have been some issue with Firefox site storage.
I deleted that from my profile folder and now its loading ok.

 

[zappaDPJ]

It seems to have been some issue with Firefox site storage.

I've had similar issues with Firefox, sites becoming slow and unreachable. Anyway TAZ is still advertising Cantilever Paper Slitting Machines whatever they may be which says a lot about the lack of management there.

 

[Paul M]

Its clearly something to do with the site.
I logged in and within 2 minutes it broke FF again, now I just get "409 Conflict" responses again.
I did manage to remove that Spam post before it died again.

Management ?
There really isnt much any more, the admin is rarely seen.
The new registrations queue often hits over 100, I more or less gave up.
Since its now breaking my browser, I guess I'll bother even less, since I cant ....

 

[ActorMike]

Its clearly something to do with the site.
I logged in and within 2 minutes it broke FF again, now I just get "409 Conflict" responses again.
I did manage to remove that Spam post before it died again.

Management ?
There really isnt much any more, the admin is rarely seen.
The new registrations queue often hits over 100, I more or less gave up.
Since its now breaking my browser, I guess I'll bother even less, since I cant ....

How much do you get paid to moderate a website like that? Almost sounds like your account is "discouraged" lol

 

[zappaDPJ]

How much do you get paid to moderate a website like that?

I can answer that as a longstanding former administrator. Nada, nothing, sweet FA

 

[Paul M]

How much do you get paid to moderate a website like that?

£0.00 per year.

 

[Max Fridman]

VerticalScope, behind 1,200+ online communities, just confirmed Google updates have negatively impacted their business.

Some highlights from their Q1 '25 earnings update:

• Revenue decreased 8% to $13.6M
• Increased consulting costs for "AI initiatives and SEO optimizations"
• Adjusted EBITDA decreased 30% to $3.6M
• They expect to average 90M monthly active users in Q2
• Generated $3M in operating cash flow
• Net loss of $2.4M (compared to a $1M loss a year ago)

Regarding SEO they also noted that volatility in search results is something they've been dealing with for 20 years so they're not in new territory.
They added that it could be the case that in a future update, things swing back in the direction of prioritising their forums in results again.

Over the last 18 months they massively benefitted from Google's change to more prominently feature forums in search results, but the tide may be turning there.

Looking at the year-over-year search traffic changes for 100 of their forums, third-party data suggests 88 have seen search traffic decrease.

To be respectful, I don't want to go into too much detail on the specific sites, but some estimated to have lost traffic include MTBR.com, ArcheryTalk.com and AskAndyAboutClothes.com.

Many sites appear to have dropped in traffic levels to where they were around two years ago, before forums started featuring far more prominently in search results.

Just as I was about to share this report with the world, VerticalScope confirmed they've seen overall traffic drop 8% year over year. They believe Google is now prioritising AI Overviews and YouTube in search results.

I mean all the respect in the world when I write this (and marked it as 'Somewhat Negative') but this may be a good sign for content site owners which lost out to forums in recent years.

From: https://detailed.com/state-of-seo/

"In Q1, we navigated some challenges, including a more uncertain macro environment, softness in video advertising rates and recent changes to Google's search algorithm which affected traffic on Fora communities. As a result, revenue was 8% lower than prior year," said Rob Laidlaw, Founder, Chair and CEO of VerticalScope.

Mr. Laidlaw continued, "Like other user-generated platforms, we're adapting to an evolving search experience, one that requires optimizing our strategy for AI Overviews, and integrating our own proprietary AI-driven enhancements to improve engagement, accessibility and monetization over time. We are better equipped to handle these algorithm changes with the Fora platform, and the integration of AI, allowing us to roll out important upgrades very quickly. Despite the traffic volatility causing MAU's to be 8% lower in the quarter, we remain confident in our business model, the strength of our communities, and the long-term opportunities ahead."

From: https://investors.verticalscope.com...t-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results/default.aspx

 

[thomas1]

Google's March Core Update was detrimental for us, too.

 

[CedricV]

Google's March Core Update was detrimental for us, too.

For everyone. Just the way it goes I guess. Forums are slowly becoming obsolete.

ChatGPT is now actually climbing the ranks, soon above Google. Which means we are adapting new methods of using the internet. So within time, ChatGPT will replace Google. And to be honest, that's what I'm doing too. I'm no longer wasting hours on google doing research. Instead I just ask ChatGPT and get my results within minutes with the correct sources to back up the research. Time is money, people.

 

[Max Fridman]

As usual we come to the argument: forums are obsolete.
The answer is as usual: it depends.

VerticalScope still makes $13+ mln a year. Only 18% of sites belonging to Digital Goliaths had an increase in yoy traffic. SEO as an acquisition channel works and the bulk of users and visitors, comes from Google not various LLMs (Perplexity, Claude, OpenAI).

And AI overviews are available on Google as well, in ever increasing quantities by the way. And so Google's ability to respond better to certain searches. Number exceeding 5 trillion now.

Google Has Over 5 Trillion Searches Per Year

Google has posted some fresh data, saying they answer over 5 trillion searches per year. The last time we saw this data was in 2016, when Google was at 2 trillion searches per year and then 1.2 trillion in 2012.

www.seroundtable.com

People are looking for content produced by other people, trivially the internet is evolving, toward editorial content produced differently and presented by AI. And the market is likely to change again.

Enthusiast Gaming's report on the growth of PocketGamer.com is emblematic:

The Company’s key owned and operated properties saw sustained engagement and continued year-over-year growth, with overall web pageviews across all web properties increasing to 1.8 billion in Q4 2024 compared to 1.5 billion in Q4 2023, despite both the sale of certain of the Company’s legacy casual gaming properties in April 2024 and the Company’s intentional deprioritization of third-party-owned, low-margin network sites throughout 2024. The Company saw material contributions to this growth from its core property Icy Veins, the Company’s leading site for Blizzard games and ARPG enthusiasts, which saw record user activity on the site from both the continued impact of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft expansion: The War Within, and Blizzard’s October launch of the Diablo IV expansion: Vessel of Hatred, as well as significant contributions from sites like PocketGamer.com, which doubled its traffic over the course of 2024 and continues to grow as the go-to destination for mobile game news, guides, tier lists, and reviews.

From: https://www.enthusiastgaming.com/enthusiast-gaming-reports-q4-and-full-year-2024-financial-results/

I would honestly expect more critical thinking from people who have been running forums for more than 10 years now. And not saying the same things over and over again.

The point of the discussion is not to note that forums are dead, but to see how big companies relate to changes in traffic.

 

[TCG2007]

Own 1200 sites and have done NOTHING to advance or improve communities. And since they're locked to an old version of XF 2.1, they're gonna be in some trouble sooner than later.

 

[Suzanne O]

Sounds like people have cottoned on to what Verticalscope is about and hate what they've done to forums and their software.
It will teach them a lesson or two.
Verticalscope have mucked up and found out.

 

[cpvr]

Own 1200 sites and have done NOTHING to advance or improve communities. And since they're locked to an old version of XF 2.1, they're gonna be in some trouble sooner than later.

exactly. Prior to purchasing those forums, a majority of them were flourishing and doing well.

Google focuses on mainly active forums and if a forum isn’t providing that, it won’t perform that well.

The main issue here is that they’re not doing anything, it’s not a google problem, it is not a forum wide concern. It is not a forum’s declining concern.

Online communities are still going to do well as long as their leadership continue to provide value and lead the way. However, once their leadership stop caring, then that’s when forums will become demolished and disappear.