Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis
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That may have always been their desired business model, but the community spiraled into such a richer resource than that. It would be a discredit to the community to limit description that way.
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Once taken over, they could possibly start charging a small fee for membership to include the help desk and monitoring products. A buy out company normally looks at ways of increasing profits.
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@StuartJordan said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Once taken over, they could possibly start charging a small fee for membership to include the help desk and monitoring products. A buy out normally look at ways of increasing profits.
That would likely reduce profits. Especially given the support team layoffs. A product that makes its money via ad revenue can't realistically start charging, especially when functionality has been declining, not increasing. In order to do so they would need to maintain or increase the very things that they have been phasing out, and would just be expected to cause their existing users to leave.
ZD isn't reckless, they are buying to operate the business, not to burn it down for a few months of increased profits. Profits don't go up just be increasing prices. That could easily be the nail in the coffin.
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@StuartJordan said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
A buy out company normally looks at ways of increasing profits.
This is true, especially when buying a company running at a loss. But the primary way that buyouts do this across the board is not by doing things that the original company could have done. If charging for the software could have made money, we'd likely have seen it happen long ago. Instead what we expect is ZD to bring in their expertise and/or scale and leverage that to lower the overhead of SW to, they hope, a point where the existing model starts being profitable by not costing as much.
Same model that ML was interested in using with them. We know how to operate a website at massive scale with a tiny fraction of their costs. What has been costing millions in infrastructure and staff at SW we could roll into our existing ops almost without noticing it! Yes, they have a ton of traffic, but not an amount that is significantly more than our existing infrastructure and support team handle today. We'd need no new people, and only a nominal increase in physical infrastructure. But we could shave millions from their cost.
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Is there a way I can close my account over there so I don't get spammed
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@WLS-ITGuy said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Is there a way I can close my account over there so I don't get spammed
You can just request it, should any community people still be working. Community people are in the layoff list so far.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Community people are in the layoff list so far.
As opposed to who? They've already terminated all of their previously valuable community members, going on a year now right?
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@DustinB3403 said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
@scottalanmiller said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Community people are in the layoff list so far.
As opposed to who? They've already terminated all of their previously valuable community members, going on a year now right?
They had a lot of bloat, it'll take a lot of layoffs to pair it down. But the community was mostly untouched before. Not completely, but mostly.
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@scottalanmiller I was referring to their "we're axing everyone who is a member of any other tech community"
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@DustinB3403 said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
@scottalanmiller I was referring to their "we're axing everyone who is a member of any other tech community"
I expect that to stop. ZD has loads to lose by looking unprofessional. They aren't the small time, SMB focused wild west. Big corporate publishing has very different ways of handling things.
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@scottalanmiller Maybe ZD is buying SpiteWorks to close SpiteWorks forever?
Hopes and prayers
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One thing that is going to be a problem for the community now, is that the parent company J2 Global owns products like eFax, MyFax, FuseMail, Vipre AV, SugarSync, etc. Those are all potential customers of SW and will be a conflict of interest with other advertisers.
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SW will now be a peer with some of these businesses:
IGN
Mashable
PC Magazine
Askmen.com
Geek.com
Humble Bundle
Excel Micro
Vipre
SMTP, Inc. -
@scottalanmiller They'll just have to stop advertising on SpiteWorks from a green account and instead have un-sponsored ads/banners.
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Their new parent company has a profile on SW:
https://community.spiceworks.com/service-providers/60628-j2-global-inc
They claim to be an MSP.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Their new parent company has a profile on SW:
https://community.spiceworks.com/service-providers/60628-j2-global-inc
They claim to be an MSP.
They also have zero activity of any sort on that profile.
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And that j2 profile points to https://community.spiceworks.com/people/adamnadeau
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Someone should login to spiteworks and see if they'll be reinstating the accounts that were axed because of the tantrum of SpiteWorks management.
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@DustinB3403 said in Spiceworks Just Got Acquired by Publisher Ziff-Davis:
Someone should login to spiteworks and see if they'll be reinstating the accounts that were axed because of the tantrum of SpiteWorks management.
There is no reasonable change that someone has divulged that to J2 Global.
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In this post about SW's viability: Jay mentioned hiring the new community managers as examples of how the platform was viable. Does laying them off imply something? They've delinked both accounts at this point.
