Hackaday For Sale, Editors Seek Crowd Funding To Buy It

ilikenwf writes "Hackaday's owner, Jason Calacanis, has decided to sell the popular hacking/modding site for around $540,000. Multiple parties are interested; the most promising buyer at the moment appears to be the current editors, who are attempting to buy the site via crowdsourcing and incorporate it under a nonprofit to keep the hacks flowing. One way or another, the site should survive."

Comments

Buying a blog...?

[DogDude]

What exactly does it mean to "buy" a blog? Are they wanting to pay half a mil for a domain name? Is the content really worth half a million bucks? Or, are people just stupid when it comes to trying to put a dollar value on anything Internet related? It seems like a lovely little blog, but I don't see how any sane person could come up with a $500,000 valuation for it.

Re:Buying a blog...?

[tibit]

Presumably if it brings in ~$125k in ad revenue per year, it'd be "worth" about 4 times that, or $500k. I personally think that even with that much yearly ad revenue I would not spend that kind of money on such a site.

Re:Buying a blog...?

[EvanED]

They said that they were offered a revenue-sharing stream of $10K/month for 30 months. The reason they declined that, from what the editors were saying, was that it would leave too little revenue for other stuff. They also say that the current owner is using the revenue stream to fund other, unrelated startups.

If those are true, it's likely they're getting more than $10K/month. You're looking at 3-5 years to break even at the most if that were to continue. Hackaday has been around way longer than that.

Re:Buying a blog...?

[hawguy]

Presumably if it brings in ~$125k in ad revenue per year, it'd be "worth" about 4 times that, or $500k. I personally think that even with that much yearly ad revenue I would not spend that kind of money on such a site.

So you would turn down an investment that gave 25% returns when bonds are paying 2%? Free advice: you might want to get some professional help to manage your 401k.

Past performance doesn't guarantee future results

If anyone is putting a significant portion of their 401K into a highly speculative investment like an internet blog website, they definitely need professional help to manage their 401k.

Ownership

[d18c7db]

So the way I see it, the campaign initiator is asking a whole bunch of supporters to buy this site for him at a cost of $540000, the contributors will not be part owners or have any say in the direction the site is run. They'll just get some trinkets in return, stickers, T shirts or some free advertising for a year.

Re:Start there own site

[mwvdlee]

Why is the owner an asshole?
Presumably, he's spend quite a lot of his own time and money building and growing the site.
Whether it's worth the money he asks for it, is upto the market to decide. Apparently the editors think it is.

One fan's view point

[mewsenews]

I've read hackaday for years.

A couple weeks ago on July 1st, Caleb Kraft announced he was leaving and the site went for sale on the same day.

This was kinda suspicious for both things to happen at the same time especially because Caleb never explained why he left. HOWEVER, Caleb has posted to his personal site that he's started a new job at EETimes.com. Not sure why that was worth keeping secret.

Still, the whole thing feels like the current owner is holding the site for ransom. The way it is being explained is that the profits from hackaday are being poured into other weblogs, but if this campaign is successful, a non-profit will be formed and advertising profits will be poured back into the site.

I don't understand why they don't just buy a new domain. The freakin site is made with wordpress, who cares, the community can migrate.

Re:One fan's view point

[AmiMoJo]

The community isn't worth maintaining anyway. Most of the people posting either don't seem to know what they are talking about or are just trolling. Really, the level of trolling approaches YouTube at times, and the admins don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

I think the basic problem it that HAD was build around Arduino level readers, people who really don't have a lot of knowledge or understanding and gawk at fairly simple "hacks" that many of us do day-to-day in our jobs. The really knowledgeable ones feed down a trickle of information and plug-in Arduino shields for them to play with, but anyone looking for real debate or insight goes to places like the EEVBlog forums.

In other words HAD is really only worth what the advertising brings in. Caleb fancies himself as a dot-com half millionaire but his site is basically a badly written aggregation feed. People use it because it's convenient or they like trolling, but $500k is vastly overestimating the value.

It will be interesting to see what happens when they fail to reach their target, because they will then get nothing. Caleb will also be in line to get nothing, having pitched way too high.

Re:One fan's view point

[brianbenchoff]

Guy behind this whole mess here.

You might have noticed some really weird stuff on Hackaday recently. The two new additions to the Hackaday 'family' - the lifehacks and handmade subdomains - are Jason's idea. We weren't too thrilled with the lifehacks but I digress.

The straw that broke Caleb's back was the suggestion of a 'fashion hacks' sub. I'll admit what laqueristas can do is extremely impressive, but it's not really Hackaday, is it?

When the 'for sale' post went up, a whole bunch of people suggested doing a kickstarter or something. I did it, and that's where we are today.

Caleb went to EETimes, I'll still be at Hackaday even if this campaign doesn't succeed. I'd really like to make Hackaday better than what it is, and without the revenue going towards Jason's other startups, we can do that. We have the revenue and fanbase to do some really, really cool stuff.

Re:One fan's view point

[brianbenchoff]

This isn't Caleb's idea. It's mine.

If the campaign fails to meet its goal, Jason will either sell it to someone else, or he'll keep running it like it is forever. If it does succeed, I'm not a dot com half millionaire. Jason gets the money. I just get the job of making Hackaday better than what it is now.

As far as the trolls... Yeah. We do a hands-off moderation policy. We might start thinking about some sort of 'voting' comment system if this thing succeeds.

Re:One fan's view point

[mirix]

Yep. 90% of the 'hacks' are terrible, most of the write-ups are terrible, and 95% of the comments are clueless or trolling.

Still some interesting things on occasion, though.

Re:half a mil for a wordpress site ?

[arfonrg]

Anyone can start a Wordpress site, he's selling the brand and the following. I have several blogs and they are alot of work.

I love Hack-a-Day and I thank him for getting it this far. I hope it stays around.

Re:MIght as well get rid of my RSS

[Spy Handler]

yeah, hope that never happens to Slashdot.