[Acquisition] PoliticalHotwire.com

[Amit]

We have acquired politicalhotwire.com, and will soon merge it with Politicsforum.com soon.

That means, we will have arnd half a million posts and 5k members on PH.

[Charles Stover]

Good to hear.

(Did you get the Twitter account from them as well?)

[Air Prange]

Designersforum is jealous.

[Beano]

My views are mixed. It's good that our community is growing, but what happened to growing our current forums rather than buying and merging? It just gives us a false sense of achievement, we need to work to make Channelfuse the #1 community rather than just throw money at everything. I'm sorry if this post offends anyone but I think it needs to be said.

[Charles Stover]

Acquiring and merging is just a faster way of growing the forum, excluding dead forums. When you buy a site with active members, the members will continue to be active, and the site will thus grow as a result. This isn't including the growth that results due to great search engine ranking as a result of more content. This can be evidenced by the hundreds of clicks (and thousands of link displays) from Google that PoliticsForum has received. Had content not been bought, Google wouldn't think twice about indexing the site, as it would otherwise be virtually contentless compared to other political forums.
In fact, PF is still very lacking in terms of search engine ranking - something that will mostly only be solved with more content - and that needs to be addressed before it can swiftly and permanently grow without the help of acquisitions. It is only a few positions away from receiving absurd click-through rates (changing those thousands of displays to thousands of clicks, instead of just hundreds). Acquisitions are probably the cheapest and easiest way of doing this, and with active members in the acquisitions, the self-propelled content generation is not only greatly helped by the acquired members but the search engine results that come as well.