According to the rumor mill, Mason Malmuth has ordered 2+2 mods to pull links to quality strategy posts on the popular message board because they may be impacting book sales.
There was even a post on the News, Views, and Gossip forum but it says that it’s been moved.
But if you click on that link it takes you to a page saying that you are not authorized to view the page which seems very strange.
So I did a search on the person who started the thread, jdrury12, and it says that he has no posts.
However searching by keyword I do see jdrury12 has been registered on the site since Jan 2008 and has 30 posts to his credit. Weird.
Obviously this is pure speculation but back in May Ed Miller posted that he had been pressured to pull his strategy articles off his website and put them behind a subscription wall. Specifically he says "For the last nine months, behind the scenes, I’ve been receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of the content available for pay only (sounds ridiculous, I know)." I remember thinking at the time that it seemed odd that anyone would be threatening Miller. The only conclusion I could come to was that it was from 2+2 Publishing or some other business partner who wasn’t happy that he was giving away so much for free.
If this is true then I think it’s truly sad. Not just that 2+2 would make it harder to find quality content on 2+2 but that they would resort to threats aimed at people like Ed Miller. I credit much of what I know about poker to 2+2 and Ed Miller. If it hadn’t been for Miller’s excellent strategy posts I would have never purchased his book.
In a way, if this is true, I think 2+2 is acting like the RIAA. Instead of being creative and trying to better monetize their content they’re attempting to penalize the users. And they’re using the same analogies about authors (artists in the case of the RIAA) royalties being impacted to justify their actions. Obviously Miller didn’t think his website was hurting his royalties but 2+2 did so they allegedly put the pressure on him to put his content behind a paid subscription wall.
@bravos1: Well I tend to agree with you.
I think it is a huge stretch that Mason is taking here to weigh books sales numbers against various posts on the 2p2 website. I really doubt anyone is deciding to not buy a book because of strat posts on 2p2 meeting their needs.
Wow, pretty gross… Good post. I hope Mason rethinks this, he’s being a little silly in my opinion. The slowdown in book sales might be because of saturation, not because of a website (LOL).
@BSN: I completely agree with the comment about not monetizing the site properly. Nat Arem has made some similar comments recently.
http://www.natarem.com/poker-seo/twoplustwo/
all you’re left with is posts about Clonie Gowen’s boobs.
You say that like it’s a bad thing 🙂
One has to wonder about how well 2+2 is doing with monetizing the forums themselves. It is such a valuable and authoritative web property, and it should be incredibly lucrative on it’s own.
Without seeing the data, I’d still say that if I had a chance to move from a capital-intensive business model (2 years’ inventory???!!!??? Hello, carrying costs???!!!???) to a non-capital-intensive model, I’d do everything I could to facilitate the transition.
2+2’s value is 1) community and 2) organized and accessible information. Take away #2 and all you’re left with is posts about Clonie Gowen’s boobs.