3 ms·

Usually I'd agree completely, but in this case I'm not sure I mind. Happy to be wrong, but as I see it there's three things of value in ADSBx. The brand/reputat

Usually I'd agree completely, but in this case I'm not sure I mind. Happy to be wrong, but as I see it there's three things of value in ADSBx. The brand/reputation, the server/feeder software and the amount of real time data provided by the community. Without the latter the brand becomes worthless, and the software in the middle is predominantly open source software. £20M for the name in the knowledge that the software isn't secret, the infrastructure isn't that complicated and that the community will rebrand and be back up with a couple of months of disruption (ala freenode->liberachat) seems like guilt free retirement money in the bank. You could even make an anonymous donation to whoever takes the place. The value comes from the current data, and the data is reliant on the community which is something you can't purchase. Most people liked ADSBx because it supported MLAT and was happy to report aircraft that from that data that usually wouldn't show on pf, fr24 and most others. If that functionality is removed then the community would likely die away naturally anyway.

kelnos 4y ago
What is the value of all the historical data? Because if the historical data isn't all that valuable, I feel like Jetnet bought a turd. Building and operating a service like ADS-B Exchange doesn't sound particularly technically challenging or expensive. Building a community of people who send you data for free is the hard and time-consuming part; IMO that's where ADSBx's value is. Did Jetnet not anticipate that the acquisition would likely drive away a good number of those people? Seems pretty naive if they didn't.
- nocoiner 4y ago
  It seems like a really weird PE acquisition to me. Did they have iron-clad, shockingly lucrative data distribution contracts? The site still has a donate button on it as of this moment, and somewhere says something along the lines of “in the very unlikely event our revenues ever exceed our opex, all excess will be reinvested in the project.” One of the technical leads on the project said the site was generating between $500-3000 a day in revenue. It wasn’t clear if that was just ad revenue (which is a cash flow PE is definitely NOT buying) or ads + data subscriptions, but I just can’t imagine they bought much of substance here, when it sounds like the entire technical team has moved on. If the feeder network declines, what’s left? Stale flight data? Super weird investment.

kelnos 4y ago

What is the value of all the historical data? Because if the historical data isn't all that valuable, I feel like Jetnet bought a turd. Building and operating a service like ADS-B Exchange doesn't sound particularly technically challenging or expensive. Building a community of people who send you data for free is the hard and time-consuming part; IMO that's where ADSBx's value is. Did Jetnet not anticipate that the acquisition would likely drive away a good number of those people? Seems pretty naive if they didn't.

nocoiner 4y ago
It seems like a really weird PE acquisition to me. Did they have iron-clad, shockingly lucrative data distribution contracts? The site still has a donate button on it as of this moment, and somewhere says something along the lines of “in the very unlikely event our revenues ever exceed our opex, all excess will be reinvested in the project.” One of the technical leads on the project said the site was generating between $500-3000 a day in revenue. It wasn’t clear if that was just ad revenue (which is a cash flow PE is definitely NOT buying) or ads + data subscriptions, but I just can’t imagine they bought much of substance here, when it sounds like the entire technical team has moved on. If the feeder network declines, what’s left? Stale flight data? Super weird investment.