Brownells buys AR15.com

AR15.com Community Members,

We have exciting news to share with you today about the future of AR15.com.

The News

AR15.com has joined the 2nd Adventure Group family. The 2nd Adventure Group is wholly owned by Pete and Frank Brownell, and also serves as the umbrella company that owns Brownells, Inc. and other industry brands.

The Avila family will continue to run the site day to day and the same moderators will moderate the forums under the same rules for which you are accustomed.

Why?

In today’s world of social censorship and the muzzling of pro-Constitutional voices, it’s more important than ever to have a modern, forward-looking place where we can all meet, debate, discuss and create ideas to keep our Second Amendment and our uniquely American freedoms strong for generations to come.

In line with that need, the Avila family has long had a vision for making AR15.com an even more robust community for freedom-loving people like you. However, we need more resources to help make our vision a reality.

Under the new ownership structure, we (the Avila’s) can focus on developing critical website improvements, which include, but aren’t limited to:
•Easier to navigate forums
•A better equipment exchange
•More content production
•A host of user-friendly upgrades

The Future

We elected to partner with Pete and Frank Brownell because we’ve known them personally for years to be real advocates for both our First and Second Amendment rights. They see the importance, now more than ever, for having a free, unfiltered forum of pro-Constitutional voices and ideas to be heard. Put simply, they share in our vision for the future of AR15.com.

In the near term, not much will change. However, in the not-too-distant future, you can expect upgrades to the site aimed at improving your abilities to connect with friends and fellow community members, learn about new products, debate the topics of the day and interact with our advertisers… all in an effort to make AR15.com the ultimate voice for freedom.

We sincerely thank you for the 23 years of continued support; we can’t wait to see what the next 23 bring.

In Freedom,

Edward, Juan & Jorge Avila

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DutchV said:

This is one of the few times when "selling out" doesn't sound terrible. Brownell's has been around a long time, and they're a decent company. You could do tons worse than having them in charge.

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danb said:

It sounds to me like a capital infusion into ar15.com to create an alternative to Facepalm and twitter.

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WildWeasel said:

Cool. I support both, as both support the 2nd.

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Slim said:

Still though, I at least liked to think that ArfCom was an independent voice in the 2A realm. Obviously they had advertisers, but it was larger run by and for the community.

I guess we’ll see.

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danb said:

I thought all those data centers were mining bitcoin now.

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Occam said:

I was in a Virginia datacenter the other day, walking along with an engineer. We entered an enormous co-lo space, fenced off for one client. Ten rows of server racks, each close to 100 feet long. Using as much electricity as a typical neighborhood. Asked him if he could share with me who that one client was.

He wouldn't name names, but asked me if I was familiar with those cookie-based follow-up ads from retailers, the kind that use your visit (if you've permitted the cookie) to remember you later, in hopes of offering you up a more appealing mix of products, or - most often - reminding you that you were looking at a particular product. An ad for that particular product may even pop up somewhere else (another web site being paid to syndicate such ads) in hopes of bringing you back to place an order. Sounds like a very niche business, powering just that sort of ad, doesn't it? That entire datacenter footprint was doing that, and only that ... and it was one of the company's 16 such installations around the world.

Tens of thousands of servers, untold megawatts of electricity, mammoth amounts of bandwidth, storage, and human management, to say nothing of untold hundreds of thousands of hours of software development and business development. And all of that effort? FAR more useful than toying around with volatile nonsense like virtual currency. Powering commerce and connecting customers with sellers is a far more rational use of all of that horsepower than is speculating on digital tulip futures.

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danb said:

After I buy an appliance like a range, I see ads for the same appliance for months. How many refrigerators/stoves/dishwashers do they think I need? Next time in the data center ask them.

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Occam said:

I was in a Virginia datacenter the other day, walking along with an engineer. We entered an enormous co-lo space, fenced off for one client. Ten rows of server racks, each close to 100 feet long. Using as much electricity as a typical neighborhood. Asked him if he could share with me who that one client was.

He wouldn't name names, but asked me if I was familiar with those cookie-based follow-up ads from retailers, the kind that use your visit (if you've permitted the cookie) to remember you later, in hopes of offering you up a more appealing mix of products, or - most often - reminding you that you were looking at a particular product. An ad for that particular product may even pop up somewhere else (another web site being paid to syndicate such ads) in hopes of bringing you back to place an order. Sounds like a very niche business, powering just that sort of ad, doesn't it? That entire datacenter footprint was doing that, and only that ... and it was one of the company's 16 such installations around the world.

Tens of thousands of servers, untold megawatts of electricity, mammoth amounts of bandwidth, storage, and human management, to say nothing of untold hundreds of thousands of hours of software development and business development. And all of that effort? FAR more useful than toying around with volatile nonsense like virtual currency. Powering commerce and connecting customers with sellers is a far more rational use of all of that horsepower than is speculating on digital tulip futures.

Click to expand...

Occam said:

I was in a Virginia datacenter the other day, walking along with an engineer. We entered an enormous co-lo space, fenced off for one client. Ten rows of server racks, each close to 100 feet long. Using as much electricity as a typical neighborhood. Asked him if he could share with me who that one client was.

He wouldn't name names, but asked me if I was familiar with those cookie-based follow-up ads from retailers, the kind that use your visit (if you've permitted the cookie) to remember you later, in hopes of offering you up a more appealing mix of products, or - most often - reminding you that you were looking at a particular product. An ad for that particular product may even pop up somewhere else (another web site being paid to syndicate such ads) in hopes of bringing you back to place an order. Sounds like a very niche business, powering just that sort of ad, doesn't it? That entire datacenter footprint was doing that, and only that ... and it was one of the company's 16 such installations around the world.

Tens of thousands of servers, untold megawatts of electricity, mammoth amounts of bandwidth, storage, and human management, to say nothing of untold hundreds of thousands of hours of software development and business development. And all of that effort? FAR more useful than toying around with volatile nonsense like virtual currency. Powering commerce and connecting customers with sellers is a far more rational use of all of that horsepower than is speculating on digital tulip futures.

Click to expand...