It looks like Onnidan will focus on statistics and website maintenance.
www.onnidan.com/Just circling the drain, and exactly what happens with failed leadership.
Onnidan as a statistical repository worked in the late 90s; Before fantasy sports became ubiquitous with sports media. Having a single location where you can find niche statistics and news filled a void. That is simply not the world we live in today. Sites like ESPN and Yahoo sports now fill that void. Any statistic you want can be found there, along with major news that keeps people browsing the site beyond their niche. At its best with this model Onnidan would be a site you'd visit once or twice a week, hence the need for the forum. It was also dying as social media ate into that market. A product that does not grow simply finds itself growing more irrelevant by the day, and that is what happened there.
You have to surround yourself with competence though. I'll tell you exactly what happened at Onnidan. Guy, who may have been ahead of his time in the 90's when most HBCUs had little to no Internet presence, made a good idea. He realized fairly soon that said idea was not really profitable long term so he created a "
Group" to try to expand into a growing market in time for the dot com boom. He
NEVER became really profitable and just floated above water for a few decades. He dies. His heirs take over the family business that is barely above water. They try to make changes(here we are now),
It dies.
When people cant turn a profit you simply turn into whatever you can in attempts to prove you can do anything. So lets see what the "
HBCU SPORTS STAT AGGREGATOR" Onnidan is offering:
Athletic Statistical/Sports Information ServicesOk this probably served a niche at a point in time, but the reality is IBM Watson provides this service at a massive discount to universities and will often throw in servers and hardware for the school to utilize with it. You
CANNOT compete in this sphere, but with smart work you could have sold the information you had before to these services and been bought out/subsidized by them to handle such things. The market has passed them by.
Information Brokering
Custom Software Development
Technology Operations Consultants
Website Administration
I was going to take all of these one by one, but why even bother. Its laughable to think anybody will take this seriously from a sports aggregation site, and just proof that being mediocre in many things instead of being good might have worked before
EVERYBODY got on the internet. It doesnt work in this world. Even if companies or people who would use these services knew WTF an Onnidan was(they dont) where in the history of that "organization" has anybody there shown they know how to run, create, or even understand how a modern website or IT business works?
This is a link to Onnidan's schedule page here:
Onnidan's 2023 Football ScheduleThis page was last updated Thursday July 27,2023, but if you told me Tuesday July 27,1993 I'd believe you. That site looks like it was made using GeoCities by a preteen 30 years ago. You think any business would see that and hire them? BS plays a part in a lot of Business, and I know Eric had to BS a lot, but surely there are limits to this.
The forum, which drove a vast majority of the traffic to the site, wasnt run any better. He bought a plug and play ezboard and it proved much too technically challenging even using basic PHP. The forum would be updated, fail, and be rolled back just to be ignored. Downtime was common even on a hosted solution. What business would pay for that?
Its a joke to think anybody who knows them would pay any of them for anything IT related. You want to know what isnt a joke though? Cybersecurity. Do you know on the forum he allowed it to be wide open in terms of email and personal information? I, along with others warned him for years about this and he didnt act once. It took Neymar of all people outing another members sexuality for him to even hide information. What business would hire a group who doesnt understand cybersecurity to administer their site?
Onnidan's true value came from the people. Not the "schedules and stats" most people can find elsewhere, and certainly not as some Crap "
IT" Firm ran by people who make webpages that look older than dirt while thinking information security is a joke.