CrowdGather, Inc. (CRWG) is an Internet company that specializes in the development and hosting of forum-based Web sites. The firm endeavors to monetize a network of online forums and message boards. Forums remain a much undervalued part of the Internet pie at $4.8 billion, and CrowdGather is the only public company dedicated to monetizing this area.
More page results equate to more revenue as page views have jumped from 12 million to 80 million through several mergers. CRWG is now in acquisition mode.
FreeForums
On March 12, 2010, CRWG entered into a website and domain name acquisition agreement with Phil Santoro in which it acquired the website, www.freeforums.org. The total purchase price of the Websites was $1,000,000, which consisted of cash and stock. The agreement also provides for payment of conditional traffic bonus compensation in the form of an additional $200,000 payable to Santoro in shares of common stock, if, during the following twelve months, the average monthly visitor traffic to the websites is greater than or equal to 59.13 million monthly page views, as measured by Google analytics.
Adisn
On June 10th 2010, CRWG announced that it acquired Adisn, a next generation Digital Ad Agency that uses relationship data from the social web to enhance targeting, for $5.5 million, the largest acquisition in CrowdGather’s history. CrowdGather will issue 4,621,849 shares of common stock for the purchase. Adisn will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the company.
Adisn negotiates advertising rates with its customers and then purchases ad inventory from real-time advertising exchanges and online publishers at a lower cost, thus capturing the difference as net revenues. CrowdGather’s unfilled ad inventory will also provide zero cost advertising inventory for Adisn’s performance campaigns, thus generating incremental revenue for CrowdGather.
With Adisn, CrowdGather has effectively achieved two objectives: the addition of a sales force for our growing advertising network; and ad server technology that can provide analytics and tracking that are required for higher value advertising campaigns.
Lefora
On July 26, 2010, CrowdGather announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire the technical assets from Lefora to consolidate CrowdGather’s market leadership in the hosted forum market. The CrowdGather network combined with Lefora’s hosted forum properties will offer a search engine and social media-friendly network of forum communities that serves over 90 million monthly page views.
Lefora has built up a user base of over 100,000 forum communities by virtue of its advanced functionality, combined with the simple user experience. Lefora allows less technical people to start their own community with a form-based editor to set up a forum that is also enabled for social media and search engine optimization. We believe the combination of Lefora’s technology and CrowdGather’s network and monetization capabilities will make CrowdGather one of the leaders in the hosted forum market by both reach and user experience.
↑Page Hits = ↑Revenue
Based upon current statistics from Google analytics, CrowdGather’s network of forums including all recent acquisitions have approximately 90 million monthly page views and 4 to 4.5 million monthly unique visitors. Additionally, approximately 5.5 million users have registered on CrowdGather Network sites to date with 5.7 million monthly discussions comprising over 82.5 million individual replies.
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