To quote myself.
I don’t think this is vaguely the right read.
No one here can answer these questions.
Yeah, it would likely be easier and cheaper to start a new board than negotiate the rights for this one or try to take it private. Just the fact that we can’t get an admin means that it’s unlikely anyone is going to put in the time to actually buy out the SDMB. And anyway, there’s not a whole lot of value to this board other than the members. If “betterdope.com” was created and provided a better experience, we could just move over and start posting on the BDMB.
lol, wut? This is exactly what a leveraged buyout is.
This is like trying to work out the details of what the leveraged buyout should be, what we can do and what we are willing to do, with representatives of that company there to hear all the details.
Sorry, I may have been unclear. A LBO is merely using the future cash flows of a company to pay down the debt accrued in buying that company. Or, as you said, “using the facilities of (a) company to organize a buyout of a part of that company”.
RJR Nabisco, hell, the entirety of Michael Milken’s junk bond LBO financing spree in the 1980s, was based on this concept.
Anyway, it looks like the principle shareholders of the STM are two VC funds and three unions. Good times!
https://chicago.suntimes.com/pages/owners
One of the funds is owned by Michael Sacks, who is the CEO of Grosvenor Funds, managing $47 billion in assets:
This fund is in partnership with Rocky Wirtz, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks.
Fund # 2 has one name listed: Leonard Goodman, principle owner of the Chicago Reader, and a man who pens columns there:
And here is the masthead, showing current ownership of the STM:
We couldn’t afford the lawyer it would take to negotiate that mess.
Little bit more research has me 89% convinced that none of the listed owners of the STM are aware of the SDMB. I mean, not in any evidentiary way, but generally billionaires and people running $50b hedge funds don’t waste bandwidth on enterprises which, maybe, earn thousands of dollars.
Other than labors of love, which is always possible.
So to buy this place a proposal would have to be made to some newspaper executive who would then review it and, maybe, bump it up to the ownership group/board. But… why would they do this? What would be the value prop, other than $, that would make him/her go to bat for the purchaser?
If we take it to the ownership group, they’re just gonna say “What? The STM owns a what? Bob, was something called the ‘Straight Dope’ included on the list of assets for the STM?.. OK. It’s worth what? Fuck, I don’t have time for this shit. Guys, go away. Come back when you have a serious offer.”
But, what the fuck: Leonard Goodman is on Twitter. I can reach out to him.
If you would be willing to do that, what do we have to lose? We’re not going to be able to pay them anything, but they may just decide it’s not really worth anything, so why keep it if it has intangible value to this community.
They may feel that there is some value in the intellectual property of the name “The Straight Dope”. But from our perspective, the “dope” association with drugs is a handicap. So we could rename the board so that we’re not infringing on the the name.
But I think the archive of historic threads has considerable value to us as a messageboard. I think we should be asking essentially if we can take the content & the membership on Discourse as it is, and just go independent under a new name.
Probably nothing, but…remember the law of unintended consequences 
.
“The SDMB? What the hell is that? Is it making any money? $12.15 net last year?!?! What a waste of resources. Just shut it down. No, not tomorrow - right now!”
Good thing you are not willing to speculate. Can anyone name any time a corporation as large as the Sun-Times has sold off an asset to a private entity? That just brings different problems. What if I chipped in ten dollars more than you? Does my opinion count for more than yours? What if one person chipped in 80% of the price, is that person now in total control?
Lots of great suggestions in this thread.
I couod be wrong, but my sense of the problem is that the SDMB just doesn’t rise to the level where anyone in an ownership/management position wants to expend any serious effort on it, yet they don’t shut it down because any internet site with this much traffic just might be valuable at some point. So we exist in limbo, always at risk of being shut down, but even the simplest of fixes require corporate involvement they just aren’t interested in.
Take the idea of setting up a Patreon. A lean startup would do that in a second. But a large corporation would have to clear the plan through legal, set up bookkeeping, pay someone to set up and manage the fundraiser, etc. And it’s just not worth their time.
I once ran a project team for a very respected piece of autmation software. When we were bought out by a huge corporation they killed the product. It just didn’t make enough money for the management overhead it now accrued. Any small company would have been happy with a product that sold hundreds to thousands of copies per year at $500/copy. But the large corporation was set up to deal in millions, not hundreds or thousands. So they neglected the product until users complained and sales started to slide, then killed it rather than invest any more.
This feels much the same. We know of a few things that might help save the board, but all require someone to step up and do some work, and the owners just aren’t interested in sinking a lot of money into a small venture for a small gain.
All that said, the idea I like the most is a fundraising period every year or six months. This is increasingly common on websites I visit, and it seems to work well. It’s relatively low overhead and doesn’t require special form access or other perks that would require a lot of effort. You can do that in parallel with merch and memberships.
You can also tie the merch together with memberships as a perk. A ‘basic’ membership gets you what you get today. For $50 you get an ‘SDMB Hero’ membership, which also gets you a mug. For $99, you get a ‘Friends of Cecil’ membership which also gets you a T-Shirt or some other swag. This is a really common way of having tiered membership.
Again, this would be easy to do for a startup, but I wouldn’t be surprised if corporate owners said, “Sorry, but we can’t afford the artwork and setup. No, you can’t allow volunteers to do it because then we’d have to use expensive lawyer time to write up contracts or risk them claiming copyright or suing us. Donations are iffy because we’re not a non-profit, so our lawyers would have to clear it. Sorry, no can do.”
That’s pretty much exactly how I imagine the conversation going too.
I would be more inclined to pitch in financially if I had a clear picture of the boards finances.
You’d think so, but 20 years ago, when this place was racking up nearly a million page views a week, all we got was griping about the cost of hosting.
As @JohnT noted, none of the organizations who have owned the SDMB have known what to do with it. They haven’t been able to leverage the content, the page views, or the community into being an asset for their media company. It remains just a weird little cost center that they threaten to shut down every few years.
Now, I don’t even know how people would find us, the SD column has been idle for a couple of years, who’s going there now? So, we have stagnant membership and not even a way for that membership to financially support the boards.
Hell, if they want to minimize the lift on doing subscriptions, just tie us into subscriptions for the Digital Chicago Sun Times. $30/yr, all you need to do is enable a SDMB indicator for the subscription, so the biz can report those dollars as supporting this cost center. Hell, they might even get more visitors to their main website.
Excellent idea! That would be a great way to donate to the support of the site. As long as we subscribed with the same email we use on the SDMB, they could match up the emails between here and the subscriptions to see how much revenue it was bringing in.
That’s exactly my impression, that the SDMB is an under-the-radar labor of love for some people, including TubaDiva. When she wasn’t replaced, it became readily apparent that “Administrator of the SDMB Asset” wasn’t a line item on any job description at the STM.
When it comes to paying, I think buying merch and giving a donation/membership/subscription with the intention of keeping the board running would come from two different places for me. My reason for buying merch would be that I liked the merch, but with supporting something I enjoy as an added bonus. My reason for donating/subscription would just be support.
I would be very much willing, I want to say, to design some of the merch or to contribute along with other designers or participate in some kind of contest. Designing t-shirts is part of how I make my money, so… I mean, not that I’m an award-winning artist, but I might have something to offer.
I know there was some discussion in one of the other threads about previous attempts at selling merch not going well. I only vaguely remember having it, but as I recall, it just wasn’t very interesting. Like… white t-shirts with the Straight Dope logo and that’s it. Also, back in the day, Cafepress was kind of the only option for the sort of thing where you contribute a design and they do the printing without anyone keeping a stock/inventory and they had issues with pricing, quality, and variety. Nowadays, there are a lot more options.
Multiple designs in a variety of styles are crucial, though. Not only does that make it more likely that people will find something they like, but it gives people a reason to buy more than one. New designs every few months so there’s a reason to keep going back to look at the merch site and because it’s easier to spend $25 four times than $100 at once.
So. I mean, not that the place is going to run exclusively on t-shirts, pop sockets, and mugs. But why not make some anyway? And get a bit of advertising out in the 3-d world as a bonus?
Man, that brings back some tough memories from childhood.
When I was less than a month old my parents took me deep into a forest and abandoned me there. Later that day a pack of wolves came by and took me with them to raise me as their own.
But only a few days later they also left me. When I was sleeping they laid me down all alone on a bed of pine needles and snuck quietly away. Fortunately another pack happened by and they also decided they would raise me.
It only lasted hours this time and I was starting to get a real complex about this. It was pretty rough, having a revolving door of lupine foster families. Crazy, really; waking up every day to a new set of wolves. And soon I was running through them even more often than that. By the time I was five I was up to 3 packs a day.