Originally Posted by
gpapadop
Are they really? I am shocked OMAAT, VFTW and Frequent Miler have not left the nest yet...
Originally Posted by
ctownflyer
Why should they?
They get their IT needs taken care of, they get BA homepage eyeballs, and they keep all the cc money.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
You know what they say about history repeating itself. Perhaps FlyerTalk has lessons there: sell and move on.
Perhaps the question really comes down to who will buy it and for what price. A lot of people don’t want to run a full operation themselves and take on a more complex — and not necessarily all that rewarding — management challenge that isn’t free from risk of providing sub-par returns on a personal investment in money and time.
This - the dodgy business model - is what makes BA and InsideFlyer unsell-able. Anybody buying the websites could see the main content providers walk out the door tomorrow. An attempt to tie in said content providers to long term contracts would cost more than the status quo. Nobody bringing in big page view numbers wants to work for a fixed salary and let somebody else take all of the upside.
But at the same time, going off on your own involves a level of fixed costs that only a few can contemplate. And even then, it makes a lot of sense to spread those fixed costs across a bunch of different bloggers. But if people put in different amounts of effort on their own blog, then the allocation of fixed costs can become contentious.
My guess would be that 1 or 2 of the titans buys out Randy, perhaps with an earn-out provision to give Randy a pension...