Admin Talk has Been Sold

Admin Talk has been sold and is in the hands of the new owner. After 20 years of running forum communities I am moving on. When I first bought Admin Talk I was in the process of closing some of my sites. When the offer to buy the site presented itself I had a feeling of renewed enthusiasm which I hadn’t felt in a while. I decided to give running communities one more go. Unfortunately that renewed vigor didn’t last long. I decided it was time to sell Admin Talk. I will still maintain a couple small communities that I have, but, my days of running a network of sites has past.

I will remain as a member and adviser. I am sure the new owner, who is an experienced admin, will take Admin Talk to the next level. I would like to thank all the members for your support and wish you all well.

The new owner will be along shortly to make a formal introduction.

 

First off I'd like to thank Bob for entrusting in me the responsibility of owning this community. Having worked with forums for the past 12 years (9 of which full time) I know that an ownership change can be an awkward time for a community. I suspect I'll know some of the faces around here from hanging out on forums for forum owners over the last decade and I look forward to meeting the rest of the members in the months/years ahead.

I started my first forum in January 2002 because I needed a way to exchange photos with other Airstream owners when I was working on restoring my 1961 Airstream Bambi. Yahoo Groups simply didn't have the tools needed to effectively communicate so, thanks to a friend's suggestion, I started a forum (www.AIRForums.com).

In 2004 I was building a website for my Mom who had just published an intercultural book about Scandinavians. I used to see the owner of BritishExpats.com on vBulletin.org a lot and admired how successful that site was. So I built a forum called SwedesInAmerica.com as a way for Swedish expats living in the USA to connect. I also planned to use the site to promote her book and services as an intercultural trainer. When I was looking for some images to use for default avatars I came across a site called LesTribunesRoyales.com which was a forum running on a very old version of IPB and there was a message at the top saying something like "Due to costs to run this site, it will be shut down in one week unless someone wants to make me an offer to buy it." I already had a server so adding another site was easy, I contacted the owner and shortly we had a deal, I was now the proud owner of two forums. I could barely remember how to spell Les Tribunes Royales so I change the name to www.TheRoyalForums.com, which is a site I still own to this day.

A few weeks later the same owner of The Royal Forums approached me, letting me know he was looking to raise some money to buy a boat. He said he had a fashion forum he was looking to sell called www.TheFashionSpot.com. I had to scrape up the money to buy the site but I'm glad I did. I converted both theFashionSpot and The Royal Forums to vBulletin and started to expand and train the teams. I noticed there was something special with forums and decided to quit my job and work on forums full time in 2005. In order to cut my cost of living I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina where I could get a filet mignon, wine, appetizer, etc for like $8. I ended up living out of a backpack for 4.5 years crossing 6 continents spending about 3 months in counties where the cost of living was relatively low. It was tons of fun and as a bonus I met my wife along the way.

The Fashion Spot grew like crazy, to a point where it was running on 5 servers and I still had trouble keeping it online. I used a vBulletin mod to make the site invite only hoping to slow the growth but then users started to sell invites on eBay and it became even more popular! In 2007 Gorilla Nation (now called Evolve Media) contacted me about acquiring the site. I sold them the site because they were able to monetize the site significantly better than I (since they were an ad agency).

I tried to launch some more sites but found it to be much more difficult then when I first started. I realized that it might be better to approach forum owners who already had successful communities going to see if they might be interested in selling. I slowly built up a network of forums which allowed me to take advantage of economies of scale. In 2012 I sold a handful of sites to Vertical Scope including a couple large ones. Now there are about 50 sites in our network which you can see on www.SocialKnowledge.com.

Over the years I tried to hire some help from outside my circle of forums but they were not forum people and really didn't get forums. I decided I was going to try and always grow by hiring folks from my forums because I know they have forums in their DNA. I now have an amazing team of folks I work with who were all members of my forums or that I know through the forum circles. On of the admins on the Airstream site (Janet) has been helping me manage the communities, she's unbelievable with working with the mod/admin teams and brings a great tone to the way our communities are managed. Our designer was a member on one of our sites and we now co-own www.CamaroZone.com together. Our main tech guy (Jeff) I found through a member on one of our sites and he now owns a couple forums of his own as well. Last year I was lucky enough to catch wind that Freddie, a long time vBulletin developer was going to be looking for a new gig so he started working for one of our projects full time (and has been awesome).

Lastly, I just wanted to let you all know that I made a small investment in Tapatalk last year at the same time a few other forum networks did. I don't plan to push any Tapatalk fanboy policies here. I've been watching the forum space for more then a decade and I've never seen a product like Tapatalk with more velocity in our space. It's like a Zoints but it actually worked and is connecting forum users across tons of sites. At a private event at Google HQ this past year they were telling us about winning mobile strategies and one of them is to syndicate your content to as many apps as possible (they referenced Flip Board for content sites). I feel the same way with Tapatalk, as they grow, being in front of their millions of users will become more and more important. Like it or not, it's something we will have to deal with and should a Google algorithm update hammer forums, they might be one of the best life lines we have. If you all want to debate the merits of Tapatalk, lets start a new thread so this one can be kept for questions, comments, etc regarding the ownership change of Admin-Talk.com.

I look forward to meeting those of you who I do not know in the months/years ahead.

Kind Regards,

Andy

 

Like the member posting above me, I am also new here. But, I have my own online history that goes back to 2002. My name is Mike Farrell. I am the owner of Wilders Security Forums. If you want to see one of our inbound links, look at Brian Krebs "Blogroll" list of recommended sites, and you'll see my site listed there. I have hosted major software company official forums there for many years, and am a contributor in the website security space.

Andy has been of help to me and my forum, as I think he can be to others. So, I am glad to be on this Admin forum and hope to be of assitance to others in my turn. If you have tech or security questions, I'll do my best to help here.

 

Looking forward to some good content and seeing this place have some TLC put into it. Thanks @AWS for keeping it going and passing it along.

 

Thanks for the warm welcome.

Bob, how long have you been living in spain? I spent some time there in Sevilla, Madrid and Barcelona. I haven't been to Costa Blanca, the nearest is Nerja. It looks like a nice area. How long have you been living there?

 

Saying hello as well.... I met Andy on his first board when I joined as a member and have been helping out at Social Knowledge since it's inception. We've had a fascinating time learning what makes forums tick and the process is never ending; each community has it's own vibe and challenges. Forums are COOL!

Bobs built a thoughtful board and I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone.

 

I guess I should pop in and say hi. Jeff here! Will try to peruse this daily when I can.