Why MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold Forum have been closed

For almost one month, two of the most known money making forums, Money Maker Group and TalkGold are not accessible and there is no update from the owners.

Both these forums have been turned off on Aug 21, 2017 according to domain infos: MMG Domain Info and TalkGold Domain Info.

I’ve checked both their Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and there’s no news about it. However that’s what you’ll see if you try to access both sites:

In this article, I’ll try to explain several reasons why MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold forum owners took the decision to pull the plug.

Both these forums are in operation since 2004 which make them almost 14 years old. I’ve been a member of these two communities for some years but decided to create my own community — TopGoldForum.com.

Who owns MMG and TalkGold.com

According to domain informations both domains are owned by a company called E&B Advertising incorporated in the United States.

This company is owned by two twin brothers: Edward Krassenstein and Brian Krassenstein. They are both listed as CEO of E&B Advertising along with other related company: Forum Advertising LLC.

Edward Krassenstein claims himself on Twitter as an Entrepreneur, Editor, Investor, Consultant. Politically Independent, Fitness, Anti-Trump., Bitcoin, Philly Phan #impeachTrump #TheResistance.His last tweet was several hours ago.

Brian Krassenstein is also on Twitter but not so active, his last tweet dated more than 4 years ago on 26 Jul 2013.

Also on their Linkedin profiles they claim to own and grow several other online communities which are running as usual: 3DPrint.com, VRTalk.com, IR.net

Whois record of the MoneyMakerGroup.com domain name.

Whois record of the TalkGold.com domain name.

Several former MMG forum users speculated that the closure of the websites was connected with the one year ago incident when Krassenstein brothers house was raided by the police.

In an interview for Money-Monitor.com, Brian Krassenstein claimed that he sold Talk Gold but still remained part of the management.

1. Social Media is the new prince

Discussion forums are rapidly and surely losing members in favor of social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin.

Facebook groups are quite popular now which is unfortunate, in my opinion, as most Fb groups are filled with affiliate links spam but for some reasons most of the users prefer to spend time on them.

2. Decline in traffic

Both MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold forums have seen big decline in traffic over the years, according to alexa.com. The images below speak for themselves:

MoneyMakerGroup Traffic according to Alexa.com

TalkGold Forum Traffic according to Alexa.com

In october 2016, both forums have a similar global rank of 40,000 but in less than a year they lost around 100,000 positions which clearly shows that the traffic collapsed.

3. Decline in Google visibility

The traffic from Google is very important for an website in order to get new members and have solid ad revenue. Again on both sites we see a heavy decline in organic traffic which is similar to the alexa chart.

MoneyMakerGroup Organic Traffic Decline

According to SemRush, MMG Forum lost 91% of their traffic from Google. And the situation for TalkGold forum is similar.

There may be multiple reasons for this but in my opinion this happened because of Google algorithm changes that penalized websites with questionable backlink profiles and poor content.

4. Decline in revenue

With such a heavy decline of traffic is obvious that the ad revenue of both sites sinked. Both MMG Forum and TalkGold relied on advertising sales for their most of the revenue.

Adblockers became very popular in latest years which makes for sites sell advertising quite difficult to make a buck and that’s the case for these two forums as well.

Also keeping up and running such communities requires expensive hardware (dedicated servers, firewalls) which can easily take up to $2000 from admin’s pocket.

5. Errors due to old software

MoneyMakerGroup was powered by Invision Forum v2, which was released around 12 years ago. As I’ve visited the forums from time to time I seen that they haven’t upgraded the community software which was quite buggy and slow.

I suppose they had to deal with a lot of bugs and errors which are both time and money consuming.

Unfortunately the administration team didn’t invested in upgrading the platforms and keeping them up to date, preferring to “milk” the communities of advertising sales.

Will they come back?

Most probably not. As you could see by the reasons explained above there are small chances to see those two forums back.

There is too much work and small chances to become profitable again. They are now part of the online money making history and should remain like this.

Was that the best decision?

Unfortunately, the members of these two forums remained without any way to back up their data, personal messages etc which is unfortunate.

The administration team should gave an announcement several months in advance so users could download/save their informations.

Do you know TopGoldForum.com?

I’m a forum advocate and I’m running a money making discussion forums called Top Gold Forum. We are not as popular as those forums used to be but we have a strong etiquette and a solid members database.

I’d love to personally welcome members from these two communities — MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold to the community I administrate for over 11 years and make TopGold Forum their own new home.

P.S. If is done right, online communities can still be profitable for admins. Find out how to make money with forums.

Originally published at monetize.info on September 23, 2017.