At this moment, METAR has 23 of the 25 Most Recommended posts. True, low volume, but impressive nonetheless.
Ok, very low volume.
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
AW
22 Likes
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
Certainly a significant risk.
DB2
2 Likes
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
Seems we were discussing that when they announced the board cull. If their revenue source is putting ads in front of eyeballs, and they eliminate where a large portion of where the eyeballs are, seems they would cut their own revenue sharply.
Maybe the Fool has been taken over by MBAs indoctrinated in “analytics”, who start at the bottom and systematically cull whatever is the lowest profit product, and cull, and cull, and cull, until only a handful of high profit “premium” products are what is left. We see that in autos and residential real estate. That is what Welch did at GE: cull divisions, cull 10% of staff every year, and brought a blue chip company to it’s knees.
Steve
7 Likes
Maybe the Fool has been taken over by MBAs indoctrinated in “analytics”,
My bet is Jack Welch-trained MBAs.
intercst
6 Likes
I just looked at Saul’s board. They’re down to 10 posts per day. It seems like the community just evaporated.
intercst
1 Like
I just looked at Saul’s board. They’re down to 10 posts per day. It seems like the community just evaporated.
No kidding. I think we can use their board as a barometer for a market bottom. If their board starts to pick up steam again then start backing up the truck.
Back to Forums, when are they going to migrate us to a more modern forum infrastructure? I absolutely hate the software running the forums. Its junk and annoying to use.
1 Like
I just looked at Saul’s board. They’re down to 10 posts per day. It seems like the community just evaporated.
My comment about the issues at Saul’s board
https://discussion.fool.com/not-sure-what-this-board-is-becoming…
The Captain
1 Like
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
No evidence to support this, but my guess is that TMF doesn’t regard these freemium boards as their “community.” They probably haven’t for a long time.
Before the dotcom bubble burst, TMF used to be more in the “DIY” segment of the market. Sure, they made stock picks and had model portfolios - but mostly for free, and mostly to try to illustrate the financial products they were selling (books on investing, mostly). They were big believers in the wisdom of crowds, and made a few efforts to try to commercialize the large group of people exchanging ideas about investing on their site (first Soapbox, and later CAPS). They actively promoted user-generated content, because having a firehose of new content was key. I believe (though I don’t know) that their media footprint was a bigger part of the company’s revenues back then - the website and ads and old-media presence (like newspaper articles and radio spots) were bigger parts of the business. They made their money offering things for free (or very cheaply) to very large numbers of people…and then “monetizing the eyeballs,” as the kids used to say.
But those days are long gone. My impression is that TMF’s business is almost entirely about selling premium services now - including access to the premium boards on the other side of the paywall. They’re (mostly) not about drawing lots of viewers to a free article (and lively discussion) on the website; they’re about having a smaller of subscribers who pay several hundreds of dollars for access to newsletters and other premium products.
That’s why I think it’s wrong to think about Boardmageddon as a business mistake for TMF. It’s just not. Us folks here on the freemium boards have been largely irrelevant to their business model for a long, long time. Sure, some folks were subscribers to premium services, and there always remained the possibility that some would become subscribers. But TMF stopped being an ad-supported media company, and more a subscriber-supported investment advisor shop, years and years ago. It’s nice that they let us use these boards for as long as they did, but the fact that they’ve kicked (most of) us out will probably have no material impact on the business.
Albaby
9 Likes
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
They might have saved it. The free boards have been dying for a long time. By eliminating some boards, the have condensed more posters on fewer boards, which means more activity on the remaining boards.
3 Likes
Seems we were discussing that when they announced the board cull. If their revenue source is putting ads in front of eyeballs, and they eliminate where a large portion of where the eyeballs are, seems they would cut their own revenue sharply.
————————-
Who actually reads the ads?
I don’t and I find some to be annoying.
…they’re about having a smaller of subscribers who pay several hundreds of dollars for access to newsletters and other premium products.
In short, they have morphed into just another stock pumping operation, for anyone stupid enough to pay for their hype? That is sort of implicit in the garbage I see on my MSN news feed daily “Motley Fool makes rare “all in” buy call”.
Steve
6 Likes
Who actually reads the ads?
Ads? There are ads here?
(Who doesn’t use adblockers?)
3 Likes
In short, they have morphed into just another stock pumping operation, for anyone stupid enough to pay for their hype? That is sort of implicit in the garbage I see on my MSN news feed daily “Motley Fool makes rare “all in” buy call”.
My Mom always taught me to not complain about the quality of the food when getting a free lunch.
Mike
26 Likes
At this moment, METAR has 23 of the 25 Most Recommended posts. True, low volume, but impressive nonetheless.
How many of them are actually about macroeconomics?
IP,
with a large number of OT threads, (not marked OT,) grayed out and ignored
1 Like
In short, they have morphed into just another stock pumping operation, for anyone stupid enough to pay for their hype? That is sort of implicit in the garbage I see on my MSN news feed daily “Motley Fool makes rare “all in” buy call”.
Sort of - but you can hardly blame them. There’s no business case for what they used to be, not any more.
Original Fool grew to minor prominence at a time when you had: i) huge numbers of people who were newly attracted to stock investing (and thus in the market for DIY stock advice); and ii) the internet was still largely website-based and financially ran on ads delivered on those websites.
All that’s gone now. The dotcom bust culled the target market of DIY stock investors. Content distribution moved from the web to apps. Advertising dollars moved to GOOG and FB. Etc. I don’t know much about the business of media, but even I can see that there’s little chance that having an audience of people who like to read articles on websites - or who like to communicate through long-form text on message boards - is going to be too valuable an asset for a business, because that’s not how content is distributed or ads are sole these days. Banners on blogs have moved to subscriptions and Substack.
Albaby
2 Likes
“My Mom always taught me to not complain about the quality of the food when getting a free lunch.”
exactly. I’m pretty sure I’m much better off in financial life because of TMF. Had zero
exposure to finance/investing while growing up, although was exposed to the concept of saving,
and hard work as a young adult. TMF definitely got me interested in having a retirement goal, and
made it clear that it could be done, with hard work and saving being the key components.
TMF did use to make statements about “the wise” ( I think that’s how they referred to the
Wall St types ), and the hidden ways that “the wise” can take a bite out of you. And then TMF
became “the wise”. But that’s ok, I’m glad I’m not having my feet held to the fire for statements
I made when I was young. TMF is a business, they’ve evolved, and I still think TMF is offering
a good product. And I have honestly not missed the political posts. They were interesting, but
offered little in the way of actionable information. I disliked 1 side, and they disliked me,
and nobody’s opinion got changed, as far as I can tell.
3 Likes
Did MF successfully kill their own community by eliminating so many boards?
That, and Saul’s recommending a toxic level of concentration in a handful of meme stocks ultimately bankrupting many followers of the Saul board. Of course his penchant for censorship didn’t help.
9 Likes
My Mom always taught me to not complain about the quality of the food when getting a free lunch.
A variant of “don’t empty your bowels where you eat.”
(There was a simpler version of this aphorism, but I can’t recall it at the moment.)
Pete
1 Like
TMF did use to make statements about “the wise” ( I think that’s how they referred to the
Wall St types ), and the hidden ways that “the wise” can take a bite out of you. And then TMF
became “the wise”.
Indeed. I was thinking, this afternoon, how the Fool has become “the wise” (yes, that was the term) that they used to ridicule. You put it nicely. I would say, the Fool became “the wise” because that is the way to get the most money out of people.
Steve
3 Likes
I’m a bit behind you. As of this writing, there hasn’t been a post on Saul’s board at all today. Strange.
Then again, the market in general has been trending down this year. That doesn’t bode well for the high growth stocks typically discussed there.
So fewer posts makes some sense.
—Peter