CrowdGather, Inc., www.crowdgather.com – one of the biggest agglomerations of community-focused forums featuring the CrowdGather Network (packed with thousands of vibrant and highly engaged, user-driven communities registering some 90M targeted page views and 4.5M unique visitors per month), disclosed details regarding the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire the technical assets from Lefora today.
Lefora, started by a small team of Internet and game pioneers fed up with the inferiority of existing online forums, quickly rose to over 100,000 forum communities since its inception in April, 2008, due largely to its social media and SEO-enabled features, as well as the intuitive design. Engineered for non-technical users, the platform allows anyone to create their own forum in under a minute.
The combination of this technology with the CrowdGather Network and its monetization capabilities stand to make CRWG a dominant force in the hosted forum market in terms of total market penetration and user experience.
Founder and CEO of Lefora, Paul Bragiel, commented on the all-stock transacted acquisition (based on trailing, fifteen-day closing price average), which will result in key Lefora personnel working with CRWG to oversee technical integration of the technology, as being a huge opportunity to both work with a like-minded company and to seed the powerful technology even further.
Founder and CEO of CRWG, Sanjay Sabnani, called the acquisition of Lefora an expansion of the Company’s already commanding presence in the hosting and platform business, and noted that CRWG now has a vastly more competitive and appealing profile with sophisticated yet intuitive new capabilities that are already widely acclaimed.
Sabnani noted the appeal to advertisers of the scale of distribution across the broad array of market verticals CRWG has access to, which runs the gamut from technology and gaming to automotive, entertainment and lifestyle (to name but a few).
In conjunction with the deal, CRWG has acquired a license to use leading embeddable forum technology from Tal.ki (Talki, Inc. is acquiring both the namesake technology and remaining assets of Lefora, Inc.), which makes the quick and easy embedding of media from third-party services like YouTube or Flickr a snap.
The Company also recently acquired next-gen digital ad agency ADISN, capturing powerful target-market focusing technology that runs on relationship data from the social web. Additionally CRWG acquired FreeForums.org in March, 2010, a massive free forum community hosting platform.
Forum owners throughout the CrowdGather Network will gain access to powerful Lefora features like weekly newsletters and SEO for driving traffic, as well as the Tal.ki quick-embed capabilities.
It certainly looks like CRWG is making all the right moves to leverage its highly interactive and information-based social network, which benefits everyone from forum owners to members and advertisers – especially advertisers, who gain a huge edge by having direct access to a largely untapped marketing audience.
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