Class-action lawsuit against IYBA & YachtWorld...

About 20 years ago I met the woman who started YachtWorld. I also met the guy who originally coded the website for her. He was of Asian descent. Here's a little known fact... some of the number of visitors and page views on YachtWorld were being driven by internal search bots set up by brokers to run every day. These are bots, not people.

Most brokers set up multiple searches per client which drives YachtWorld's page views thru the roof. BTW, early control panel software couldn't differentiate between a human and a bot, therefore it counted bots as visitors too. Great metrics for marketing, but highly misleading. By today's standards, the coding behind YachtWorld was archaic but I think it has been revamped.

I know Boat Trader and YachtWorld had been using Google's ad network to supplement revenue but it appears they have moved to native marine advertisers now. My guess is they found out what we learned many years ago. These ad networks slow down page loads and the payout doesn't favor the content producer. The main reason we don't use ad networks on YF is for privacy reasons. These ad networks are toxic as hell, loaded with trackers.

I’m not sure how all of this ties together but Boats Group is owned by Permira which sources some of their investment capital from Chinese equity firms and Chinese banks. I heard Permira wants to sell Boats Group so it’s possible the escalating fees charged to brokers along with all of the new native advertisers are to make Boats Group look more favorable for an acquisition.

The problem Boats Group faces is they have very little content that is useful to consumers. They are nothing more than listing sites. Anyone can build a listing site. In addition, many brokers are finding their own websites and listings are being indexed by search engines so when someone uses year/model/type-specific keywords, their own listings and websites are coming up in search.

ChatGPT results linking Permira, the owner of Boats Group to Chinese Banks and Equity Firms...