Jan 23, 2024
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Optimierung der Website-Geschwindigkeit. Einfache Anpassungsoptionen. 2Zur Kasse gehen. Können Sie mir beim Entwerfen eines Logos helfen?. I
Optimierung der Website-Geschwindigkeit. Einfache Anpassungsoptionen. 2Zur Kasse gehen. Können Sie mir beim Entwerfen eines Logos helfen?. I
Responsibly Selling an Online Community?
I haven't ever thought to comment on this before, but I sold my first website to Demand Media. It was one of just a few niche community websites that Demand Media bought. They haven't done anything with the website in over six years.
Demand Media has recently been in the news because their traffic has been hit hard by Google's most recent search algorithm change. Their traffic is down 44% from its peak for the year. Variety is calling it an Epic Fail. Business Insider is saying that Google "decimated" Demand Media.
The company plans to split into two companies, domains services under the name Rightside and content under the name Demand Media.
I started the paintball community in 2000 when I was 16 years old. It was sold to them in 2007 at the peak of paintball and right before the 2008 crash for a not-insignificant amount of money. Over time, it became obvious it was not significant enough for anyone at Demand Media to care about it as they shifted their focus to a handful of big properties like eHow and LIVESTRONG (I don't know the details of the relationship, but I do know they at least own the domain).
Initially they pushed to hire me, still buying the site, but having me head what would have been their niche community arm. I was determined to go back to school and head in a new direction in life, outside of the world of technology completely. I was 23, what can I say! I even went off on a three month cross-country motorcycle trip with minimal technology after I sold the website. Their niche community arm never came to be and all the small community sites they bought have been ignored. I had to email them within the last couple months about none of the pages on the website I sold them resolving because of a MySQL error. At this point in time, this probably was only losing them mid-to-high four figures a month, but still, it's not hard to use a free service to run a simple keyword monitor.
Where is this coming from? Other than Demand Media recently being in the news, I turned 30 this month and have been reflecting a lot over the past decade of my life. I have many regrets and one of those is selling an online community to Demand Media. I repeated this mistake unfortunately, but I won't talk about that now. Sometimes it takes me more than once to learn a lesson, but I can confidently say that I've learned it now.
I've been wondering what would have happened if I had taken them up on their offer to work for them. Would I have been able to be successful at it? If they had made the decision to shift their focus away from niche community websites, would they have fired me or moved me into another position? It's hard to say. The people I worked with at Demand Media during the transition are good people. I think I would have enjoyed working with them, but I doubt I could have handled working for Demand Media, my aspirations of being a research psychologist aside.
Why did I sell? Despite what some people might think, running a relatively large community is not easy, especially when you are mostly doing it on your own, other than the incredible help from volunteer moderators. I dealt with everything: community management, ad sales, coding, server administration, regular legal issues, etc. I had been running the website for seven years and couldn't take it anymore or at least lead myself to believe that. I now disagree with my 23 year old self.
Watching a community die that I'd put so much effort into aside, the more important question, and the title of this post, is: how does one responsibly sell an online community? I thought I was being responsible. I was told a lot of things when I sold to them and they didn't happen. I put a lot of effort into making the transition work.
A community website is successful because of the people who participate in it just as much, if not more, than the people who run it. When people get involved in an online community, they know, or can find out, who owns and is running the community. They can then decide if that influences whether or not they want to be a part of the community. However, the responsibility of maintaining and updating the website for the community lies in the hands of the people that run it. I have always taken that responsibility very seriously. How can you know that you've found a buyer for a community who will do the same? You can't, but I think you can take some precautions to avoid community collapse.
Try to find a buyer within your community first. This is a common sense answer, but I think a lot of people avoid this even if they have the thought. They either don't want to make a public announcement asking for people interested in buying the community or fear that a member they approach privately might share it with the whole community. Often the sale of an online community is kept secret from the community until it is finalized for fear of how people will react, then framed as a good thing for the community for any number of reasons easy to manufacturer and get people to believe.
Thoughtfully involve the community in the sale process, if at all possible. Given how important the members of the community are to the ongoing success of the community as a whole, shouldn't the community have some say in who to sell to if there are multiple interested buyers? I know this would be very challenging to do, would instigate a lot of drama from certain members of the community, and might be nearly impossible for some communities, but I still think it should be considered as an option.
Be willing to sell the community for less. Don't sell it to the highest bidder, even if they seem like a good match. It's unlikely you'll find a buyer who isn't thinking primarily about ROI, even if long term. Whoever pays the most is likely to make the biggest changes to the website to maximize profits, potentially harming the community in the process.
Don't sell the community. Find people from inside the community, as well as outsiders to handle the non-community jobs, and pay them to handle the regular tasks. You can continue to guide the community with the insiders that you've hired insights since you aren't as involved as you used to be.
I can't know the future for sure, but personally I don't plan to start or take over an online community again if I think there's any possibility that I'll ever feel the need to sell it.
Discourse: The future of discussion forums, especially for niche communities
The adoption will be slow because all changes in the world of online discussion forums are slow.
The non-trivial concerns from community owners and managers over a number of things, including forum migration and SEO (e.g. rewriting old URLs) will further slow adoption.
The resistance among some community members, especially among some community influencers will be significant and need to be addressed on a community by community basis.
There's a chance it could go down the wrong path or UX issues aren't addressed and the forums are too complex to use for a significant percentage of users.
But I really believe that Discourse will be the future of online community forums, especially for niche communities.
Discourse is an open source Ruby on Rails project started by Jeff Atwood, one of the co-founders of StackOverflow.
Eventually, they plan to offer a hosted option. If the hosting is flexible and reasonably priced, this is when I think adoption of Discourse will explode. Having your discussion forum hosted for you is a better option for most online community owners/managers in the long run so their focus can be on their community instead of the regular problems that arise from self-hosting. The frequency of these problems increases as your online community grows.
So long vBulletin, IPB and any other similar style forums. I've had a 15 year relationship with you and owe much of my success to you, but you're not innovating, leveraging your power to slow progress in general (vBulletin suing xenForo) and it's time for you to fade into memory. It will take many years, but it's going to happen, even if I'm completely wrong and it's not Discourse that replaces you.
