Verticalscope

Verticalscope owns a lot of forums. They own over 1000. Is there going to be a day when all forums are owned by verticalscope? I hope not. There was recently a data breach and they reset all passwords. All of the sites run old outdated vb 3 and they are starting to put slow crappy "modern" styles on all of their forums. Do they already own the majority of active internet forums? I hope not.

 

They have a form on their site that people can fill out if they want them to buy their forum. They call themselves "one of the fastest growing media companies". Some of their sites are covered in ads and i get popups. A lot of their sites still run vb 3.6. They own some sites with over 80 million posts. One of their sites had 1.9 million posts and then they had some issue and it is down to 500 thousand. They own so many car and pet forums. I would never sell my forum to them. I would say that they are aggressively buying forums. I hope that they do not own every fish forum in 10 years from now.

 

I am just afraid that one day they will own all forums. I hope they already don't own most forums.

 

Well i help this one guy with his forums.

 

I know internet brands owns a lot of forums also. Will all active forums with 5 million posts and over be corporately owned owned day?

 

The reason why brands or corporations will buy up popular forums/sites/services is to make money. Mostly money from ads, but also as a way to directly push users towards other services and sites where they can make more money on them buying different items/software/services. That might mean that every popular forum/site/whatever, at one point in time, will be attractive to these larger entities - however, not everyone will sell, not every offer will be deemed good enough, and some of these potential sites will be making enough on their own to not need to be bought up - that will also depend a bit on what their "feel" for the site in question is.

I doubt you'll see a complete takeover. The problem is that once you get too big, the major players will find something new, something less stifled and slow to get their "fix" - too big is never a good thing, at least if you can't actually see yourself getting too big. Also, it's almost no-cost to develop and set up new services that might be the "next big thing" - that way, the continued invention of new services will never stop.

There is doubt now that Facebook will ever fail - they're "too widespread", they have "too many people using the service" and so on. That, however, is no guarantee. Yes, it's way harder to "break in" when they have a user-base of over a billion people. However, they do not have "world domination". Neither does Google, since it's mostly used in the Western world. There is the possibility that a new service will come along, and kick their butt. It has happened before, several times. Think MySpace, AltaVista, AOL, Netscape, Yahoo - all "too big to fail", but bad decisions, not reading the market right, too slow to change when needed - all these things play a part. And, of course, Facebook was better, but I think most have forgotten how it was in the beginning - it was pretty bad, actually.

 

I am an active member on several forums with 5 million+ posts and it would suck if they got taken over. I hope that they do not get taken over.