According to a press release today, a publicly traded company, CrowdGather.com, (OTCBB:CRWG) “acquired the domain name, website, and assets related to PbNation.com one of the world’s largest online paintball communities according to Forbes and the Chicago Tribune.”
“The total purchase consideration for the PbNation.com site and assets is up to $3.2 million, consisting of $1.4 million in cash, 1,149,425 shares of the Company’s restricted common shares, and certain additional cash and stock compensation totaling up to $800,000 if certain monthly website visitor traffic milestones are achieved.”
“The number of shares issued was calculated by dividing $1 million by the Company’s 10 day volume weighted average share price of $0.87 per share through Friday, May 20, 2011.”
“PbNation generates 20 million monthly page views and approximately 1.9 million monthly unique visitors.”
“On a combined basis, the CrowdGather forum network will generate 155 million monthly pageviews and 15 million monthly unique visitors.””
“PbNation.com is the largest interactive community on the Internet with a focus on the extreme sport of paintball.”
I suppose it’s the 2nd biggest sale of the year after iCloud.com
No this is a pure domain sale, its the sale of a site
And if we could go back in time to when PBNation was created and ask the opinion of domainers about the project, 99.9% would say it was a certain failure, since they weren’t using Paintball.com, or Paintballer.com.
crwg is in the businsess of acquiring internet forums. but ultimately they’re just after traffic, just like domainers. more traffic (“milestones”) means payouts (“dividends”) to the sellers (now “shareholders”). ppc reinvented. you make the content, we take care of the ads.
it really shows just how much more commercial the internet has become, only in the last few years. selling forums that can be created by anyone, with crappy open source forum templates. a follow on from selling blogs to media companies. crazy.
will cwrg’s plan succeed? do users like corporate forums?
cwrg, domainers, many bloggers and forum creators. they’re all after the same thing: traffic.
all the same.