I don't know if co-founder Bill Martin is as disgusted, but he contacted me shortly after we acquired Silicon Investor to congratulate me and wish me luck, and we've been in on-and-off contact since, with him occasionally advertising his new company here.
I do know that he hasn't been happy with what his baby has become. And when I told him that we were interested in acquiring RB and couldn't get a response from anyone at Lycos, he expressed a hope that we'd find a way to rescue it, but, if memory serves, he also had no idea who we should contact at the company.
We were finally able to make indirect contact with the new Korean owners shortly after they acquired it and their response back indicated that they placed such a high value on RB as a key component of their acquisition that we didn't pursue it any further.
At this point, we don't want or need it. Both Investors Hub and Silicon Investor are gobbling up marketshare unrestrained. In Silicon Investor's case, we're taking it from Yahoo, who doesn't allow penny stock discussion. People who get tired of having to wade through hundreds of posts to find a few that're on-topic and worth reading are moving to SI. Similarly, RB users have been in exodus en masse for a long time and they're coming to iHub. And the pace quickens every month. To such an extent that a project/challenge looming on the not-too-distant horizon is making changes to iHub to keep it performing well under the load.
Rather than buying RB, we're getting its marketshare handed to us without spending a cent or lifting a finger. In SI's case, we've recently decided to spend a little money to nudge the process along a little since it's far earlier in its growth phase than iHub and I'd like to see it catch up this year.
We were also getting SI's marketshare handed to us, but Motley Fool was getting a pretty big piece of it, too. Our decision to buy SI was to keep and grow its marketshare for ourselves and to preserve its immensely valuable history.
At one time, I would've been interested in preserving RB's history, but it's become so diluted and polluted that I really don't see that being a reason to spend money and effort on it.
In SI's case, it didn't have the traffic to generate the income to offset the cost of keeping it running. The cost was relatively low but not inconsequential. It was on a path to the grave GNET and INSP had inadvertently dug for it with a shovel of incompetence. At least INSP had the wisdom to recognize that they are really good at a few thing but that SI wasn't one of them so it needed to be sold or shut down.
In RB's case, there's an infinite supply of people who will gladly use their platform for nothing more than flamewars. And these same people will probably shoot plenty of virtual monkeys for a chance to win an iPod, at 20 cents a shot to RB for providing the click. Likely enough to keep the lights on forever. And as long as it can pay its own way (it can if the only expense is corporate bandwidth and they never look at the value of how much of it RB consumes), it'll be around.
Meanwhile, the people who want to talk shop without flamewars will continue to come over here because for small/micro-cap discussion at the 800-lb gorilla level, we're the only other monkey around.
It's a nice position to be in. Strong dominance of a particular market and the rest of it belonging to either far smaller and therefore less attractive sites, or RB who apparently has no problem with spoonfeeding us their marketshare.
It's not so cut and dry and easy for SI. It's got 2 large gorillas for competition (Motley Fool and Yahoo), and the Fool ain't no fool and we're not going to get any of their marketshare easily, if at all (we don't need it -- the pie is huge) and though Yahoo's signal/noise ratio is awful, there's some awfully good signal there. Heck, even I participate.
