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I think people underestimate how hard it is to make an old school industry forum profitable these days.
Back in the day, webmaster and affiliate forums were one of the main places companies advertised. Sponsors would spend decent money on banners, sticky threads, promos etc because that’s where affiliates actually hung out. But the whole market has changed now. A lot of that ad spend has moved to X, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, YouTube and private groups, so there’s just less money floating around forums in general.
So even if somebody bought the site tomorrow, they’d still be dealing with the same problem, declining traffic and less advertiser interest. It’s easy to say “just fix the servers and modernise it”, but all that stuff costs money. Old forums usually run on ancient codebases too, so even small upgrades can turn into a headache.
The Cloudflare errors and downtime are frustrating, but if revenue has dropped a lot over the years, owners tend to switch into maintenance mode rather than pouring more money into it.
As for adding a news homepage like XBIZ, technically that part is easy enough now. AI can help churn out articles all day long. The harder part is getting people to actually read it and making enough ad revenue from it to justify the effort. Media traffic everywhere is down compared to years ago, especially with Google traffic being less reliable now.
I honestly think a lot of these old forums survive more because of the loyal community and history behind them than because they’re still massively profitable businesses.
Nobody is going to throw money at something and *hope* they make a return on investment, that just isnt *good* business.
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