WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 4537782

Slashdot and SourceForge sold to Dice Holdings

170 points| thenextcorner | 13 years ago |finance.yahoo.com | reply

152 comments

order
[+] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
I remember that wonderful day in 2007 when I noticed that there was a little news aggregator bodged onto the back end of Paul Graham's essay blog and I thought to myself "wow, this is like /. only it doesn't suck so much".
[+] autophil|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, but /. was the shiz for a long time. I joined in 1998 and it dominated my online social life for about 5 years.

The day of 9/11, the release of Linux kernel 2.4, and when my story submission got published were all memorable events for me there.

Probably a big reason I'm divorced now.

[+] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
There should be a rule of clue flight somewhere. But it's a highly established pattern: great minds seek out a high s/n forum, it becomes established. Over time the s/n ratio falls. How long that is varies greatly (this is a problem that greatly pre-dates the Internet), and can be affected by various exclusion mechanisms (moderation, subscription, rate-limiting, etc.).

Eventually, though, most forums fall prey to low-value contributors. There may still be gems (and often there are more and bigger/brighter gems even in the age of noise than in the heralded golden age, there's just a heck of a lot more noise), but the perception is of spoiled ground.

[+] sabat|13 years ago|reply
LOL, I had roughly the same experience. I'd already moved onto Digg (before it was went downhill) and then to Reddit. But if I'm looking for more serious (if sometimes negative) technology conversation, this right here is the epicenter.
[+] mhartl|13 years ago|reply
In late 2008, I attended an "open-source CEO" dinner, at which I was coincidentally seated between the CEOs of SourceForge and CollabNet (principal developer and supporter of the Subversion VCS). I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git, and he was dismissive, indicating that Subversion had already won as the definitive open-source VCS. I then asked the SourceForge CEO if he knew about GitHub; he was vaguely familiar with them, but appeared utterly unconcerned that they might be a threat. I thought to myself, All the battles have been fought and lost, and these guys don't even know there's a war.
[+] Spoom|13 years ago|reply
I've been posting on Slashdot since the early 2000s and have stayed on the site primarily for its community; the higher-modded comments tend to come from some pretty intelligent people. Unfortunately it seems like the current staff don't really understand why the community that is there remains and have been trying out a shotgun blast of different strategies recently: Slashdot TV, SlashBI, SlashCloud, SlashDataCenter... I just want to discuss IT with intelligent people. If they only got that the community is their power, they might be able to make the site more relevant again. It seems like when Rob Malda knew something was going on behind the scenes when he quit last year. (For more, read his AMA: http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-... )

At least there's HN if this latest sale makes /. go south completely.

[+] jlgreco|13 years ago|reply
With slashdot being sold for that little, I am still holding out hopes for Rob somehow getting his hands on the site again, gutting it, and bringing it back to its old (albeit not really profitable) glory.
[+] zheng|13 years ago|reply
I have very little perspective here, but this seems like a low price for /. and SourceForge ($20M). The article states that last year alone the two sites brought in that much revenue, but I'd assume they weren't bought if the purchaser didn't think there was growth potential.
[+] seiji|13 years ago|reply
They are basically internet retirement communities. They have a stable population until the population starts to die off. Except with a normal retirement home, there are always new old people joining. No sane person under 45 really wants to be around the /. "we hate everything" crowd or whatevertheheck sf.net turned into.
[+] dmethvin|13 years ago|reply
Many profitable businesses tail off very slowly over years, throwing off excellent revenue in the process. Last year, for example, AOL made $175 million off 3 million customers who still subscribe to its dial-up business.[1] Those businesses can become even more profitable in the near term if your strategy is to cut marketing/operating costs to the bone and "ride them down". It sounds very mercenary, but that can be the right approach when there is no growth potential.

[1] http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/aol-3million-chart/

[+] jnorthrop|13 years ago|reply
And conversely, they wouldn't have been sold at 1x annual revenue if the seller didn't think that the future prospects were bleak.
[+] debacle|13 years ago|reply
$20M in revenue, but how much in profit? Slashdot and sourceforge can't be cheap to host.
[+] Codhisattva|13 years ago|reply
Well it's different to sell a profitable company than a speculative company. Valuation of a start up is based on speculation while an operating and profitable company would go for around 110% of gross annual revenue in cash.

Since it used old school valuation we can assume a few things: * GeekNet content traffic is growing very much * There was no other bidder and no 'bidding war' * GeekNet was highly motivated

[+] ksherlock|13 years ago|reply
They must be trying to set a record for how many corporate overlords they can have. Andover.Net, VA Research, VA Linux, VA Software, SourceForge, Inc, Geek.Net, Dice, ...
[+] ben1040|13 years ago|reply
To be fair those were a lot of names for what pretty much was the same company, as VA Research went on a decade-long journey from being a Wall Street IPO hit selling Linux workstations to selling T-shirts to people who use Linux workstations.
[+] simias|13 years ago|reply
Does anybody here still use SourceForge to host their projects? Back in its days it was the place for open source software, but these days I shudder when software I want to use is hosted there. I think it failed to evolve and become what is now github. Or maybe they target an other market?
[+] romaniv|13 years ago|reply
SF is not "social", quite slow and is more difficult to use for developers. However, I feel that it is more end-user friendly. Maybe not inherently, but because of the differences in culture. There are tons of software there that I can just download and install without any tinkering. I don't recall a single application that I've ever installed from GitHub.
[+] neilxdsouza|13 years ago|reply
I host my survey and cross tab compilers on sourceforge. It's a nice place you can keep things in public, and no one will ever notice - hiding in plain sight. I didnt want to move to github because I felt loyalty to sourceforge.
[+] marquis|13 years ago|reply
There is still a lot of good legacy code hosted on SourceForge, I end up there all the time and figure that whoever the owner was never got around to moving it to github or google code.
[+] vectorbunny|13 years ago|reply
Ouch. I'd venture this is a fair indication of the directionality of the value of these aging 'name brands'. It seems not unlike a former arena-filling headliner reduced to doing van tours of Holiday Inn lounges.
[+] zeruch|13 years ago|reply
I was on the SF.net "Ignition" team (and am still close friends with 2 of the original 4 project team) and what Sourceforge aspired to be versus what inevitably was done to it...to what it has been sold to...God, what a depressing fin de sicle.
[+] joeyh|13 years ago|reply
I still wear my "cold storage" T-shirt sometimes.
[+] Syssiphus|13 years ago|reply
Bye bye /. .. you will be missed.
[+] weego|13 years ago|reply
It's been awful ever since the narrative on there was almost entirely changed to "freedom and rights from the point of view of socially awkward software engineers". You cannot curate a community based on negativity, bile and cynicism and expect it flourish.
[+] madrona|13 years ago|reply
This is surprising. I just spilled hot grits onto my lap. This (and Netcraft) confirms the rumors that Slashdot is dying.
[+] RenierZA|13 years ago|reply
Unique monthly users:

  * Slashdot: 3.7 million
  * SourceForge: 40 million
  * Freecode: 0.5 million
[+] thenomad|13 years ago|reply
Hmm. Let's assume 2 page views per visit for simplicity.

44.2M visitors /mo = 88.4M page views /mo

If they're bringing in $20m revenue per year, that means $1.66m per month, or $19 CPM, more or less.

Either they've got a lot of page views per user or they're monetising at pretty high rates. Do /. or Sourceforge have non-ad monetisation methods, or are they just getting very good ad deals?

[+] rwmj|13 years ago|reply
Does this include Ohloh as well? That's a pretty nice code analysis site, which was acquired by SF back in 2009:

http://meta.ohloh.net/2009/05/sourceforge_acquires_ohloh/

[+] boyter|13 years ago|reply
Interesting. Working on a competitor to code.ohloh I always wondered how they got such good hooks into sourceforge, but this explains it. With Black Duck owning them and Koders their strategy makes more sense now.
[+] ed_blackburn|13 years ago|reply
Would have been interesting to see github acquire SorceForge, for nothing more than the projects. I guess a migration wouldn't be worth it, the projects with life and activity would have left SF sometime ago?
[+] coffeeaddicted|13 years ago|reply
Not really. At least when it comes to desktop software a lot of free software projects I use regularly are hosted on sourceforge. Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.
[+] languagehacker|13 years ago|reply
This would be like Monster.com purchasing Fark.com. Not really news because none of those things have mattered for years.
[+] hnriot|13 years ago|reply
I, for one, welcome our new Dice Holdings overlords.

I used to love slashdot, coffee and a discussion about boot loaders for breakfast. It all went to rat shit of course, but that's just the natural order of the universe.

[+] xyzzyb|13 years ago|reply
Wow. I remember when my older brother introduced me to /. when I was a teenage nerd just starting to run Linux in 1998. There weren't even user accounts.

Now I feel like reading a Jon Katz article for nostalgia.

[+] smacktoward|13 years ago|reply
That would be an excellent way of curing yourself of the risk of ever feeling nostalgia again.
[+] willvarfar|13 years ago|reply
I was so pleased when I acquired the username `bogomips` on sf. Never did use it for much though.

Sad how obvious it is how it slipped away long before github filled the vacuum.

[+] Codhisattva|13 years ago|reply
Seems like GeekNet is going to focus on ThinkGeek.com. Good move I'd say. Well unless their next step is to sell it to Amazon (a la woot.com).