How does SF make money and how does it plan to make money? It seems like it went into a downward spiral of lower traffic and increasingly abusive advertising. Only the latter seems like something you can fix quickly.
SourceForge makes money off of advertising and lead generation. It might sound crazy, but SourceForge's traffic now is higher than it was 5 years ago. It peaked around 2-3 years ago, however. We are a small, agile company with a good team. We can keep the lights on with the current traffic levels without deceptive advertising nor bundled installers. That might not have been true with a large public company running them previously with quarterly earnings having to constantly grow.
Thanks for keeping the lights on. Please do make preparations with archive.org or Archive Team to preserve the projects on SourceForge just in case your current strategy does not work out.
The ad-blocker vs advertiser fight has just turned to total war, your target audience uses ad blockers more than any other demographic and you bet your profits on advertising.
Brave.
This is the most important question when it comes to trust. Incentives usually win in the end. Figuring out what that endgame looks like is paramount for anybody evaluating SourceForge as a platform.
This. This first announcement is a great start to restoring a bit of reputation to SourceForge however I hope some of the next posts will announce the long-term vision of the new owners for the platform. Monetization is what brought SF down, without a definite plan it's hard to know what's going to stop SF from going back down later on.
Thanks. We will be posting about our long-term plans soon.
Our model can be profitable with advertising and lead gen, with NO deceptive advertising or bundled installers. On top of that we plan to improve the UI and feature set (https just rolled out), and then, we hope, things will only improve from there.