online-communities
(7)
Betsperts Built a Sports Media Portfolio by Learning When to Leave Good Communities Alone
The Chicago company raised millions to build a social betting app. Its more durable idea was quieter: buy beloved niche sports brands, keep their identities intact and sell useful tools to the fans who already live there.
Facebook’s Second Act Is Happening in the Places the Internet Forgot
The original social network is no longer the internet’s newest room. It may be something harder to replace: the noticeboard, video channel, classifieds section and community hall used by billions.
Reddit, Inc.
The self-described front page of the internet spent nineteen years as a scrappy forum before going public. Now its archive of human argument has become one of the most valuable training grounds in artificial intelligence.
Skool
How a deliberately plain community platform - five tabs, one price, and a points-for-likes game - became the default home for the paid-community economy.
Khoros
Two decades after inventing the branded online community, the Austin software maker is betting that the millions of customer conversations it hosts are its real product - and that AI is how it finally reads them.
CMNTY Corporation
CMNTY spent years turning the messy work of listening to customers into one research room. Now, under MarketResponse, its mix of communities, live conversations and analysis shows why the best insight tools do more than count answers.
OpenWeb
OpenWeb is a social engagement and monetization platform that helps publishers own the conversation on their own sites instead of renting their audiences to social networks. Founded in Israel in 2015 as Spot.IM and now headquartered in New York, it pairs comment sections, live blogs and polls with AI moderation and in-conversation advertising. The company works with 5,000+ publishers, reaches more than 150 million monthly active users, and reached a $1.5B valuation after a $170M Series F in 2022.