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.
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?
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.