Bear4Asian

I'm just curious about how this all works. I have to say that having checked out travel blogs, I always come back to FlyerTalk because I feel I can trust the information here. So...

Again, I'm asking out of curiosity. I'm just interested how it works. And with the time and energy moderators and Evangelists spend you could argue they are entitled to something.

See above, just curious

And now I have learned a few more things - out of curiosity. There's some inside baseball in this discussion and maybe that's why I was asking questions. e.g. FlyerTalk was bought by Internet Brands (a vertical marketing company) in 2007. Internet Brands was acquired by Hellman & Friedman (an equity capital firm) in 2010. And it turns out that "The Frugal Travel Guy" was bought by Internet Brands in 2012. So I'm guessing a lot of you folks who have been around a long time probably know each other and have a history that some of us newbies don't have. I'm not suggesting anything nefarious at all. I'm just saying I like to know what's "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey would say. And before you chase me out of the room understand I admit I probably don't know the rest of the whole story.

And one more thing. Internet Brands announced on June 3, 2014 that KKR (a global investment firm) was acquiring Interbrands from Hellman & Friedman. Oh and then there's Milepoint

oliver2002

IB definitely saw value in acquiring FT from RP eight years ago, I'm pretty certain they had a decent ROI, albeit dented a bit by the implosion of the market post Lehman. See the IB vs Ran Decisions court case thread.

IB buying FTG and integrating it loosely with the FT family was probably a good deal for them too. While FT has a steady income stream thru page view ads, FTG has to probably earn its keep by plugging CC applications.

IB itself getting churned by a sequence of private equity firms is nothing unusual either in the cloud cuckoo land of internet firms.

The brilliant business setup of FT which generates content and polices itself for next to no cost to the operator is probably one of the reasons IB forked over a substantial amount of cash to the founder

kokonutz

Ya gotta love a business where 100% of the content (posters) the 99% of the labor (moderators) is provided for free by volunteers! That's one hell of a business model! ^

Jasper2009

Fully agree. Btw, has the price paid to RP ever been posted online somewhere?

sbm12

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9930; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.1066 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Not that I'm aware of. It was redacted in the lawsuit docs about the annual bonus he got for hitting target growth metrics.

kokonutz

Randy was paid a fixed amount on February 6, 2007 and was eligible for up to $2,715,000 earn-out payments for meeting metrics set in the sales contract based on number of posts and revenue metrics. As smb12 says, the fixed payment was redacted from the lawsuit exhibit:



I have heard that it was in the neighborhood of $6M, but chalk that down as speculation, not information.

According to the lawsuit and countersuit, Randy alleged that $1,193,000 of the earn-out payment that was earned was not paid. IB claimed that the payments were withheld because Randy engaged in acts intended to inflate improperly contingency payments (basically that he encouraged posting runs).

On February 11, 2011 IB and Randy reached a confidential settlement.

Lawuit documents: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vjmidslcl.../FT%20Lawsuits