So there's a lot of drama surrounding the IMVU buyout, and for once, I feel it's sort of justified. Firstly the way it all went down behind closed doors and took them months to tell us about it is just flat out shady, there is no getting around that, but that's not my reason for concern. Dragoneer claims that nothing is going to change, that we are only going to see a couple of banner ads for IMVU periodically. While I genuinely believe that this is what Dragoneer wants, he is a user of this site just as much as we are, he no longer gets the final say in that, and what's going to stop IMVU from kicking him to the curb if he doesn't do what they want? Furthermore, no one buys an entire website just to put up a few banner ads. No one buys an entire website and pays to upgrade and replace the back-end hardware of that website just to put up a few banner ads. No one buys an entire website and upgrades and replaces the websites back-end hardware AND gives the former owner of that website a salary just for a few banner ads some of the time.

I deal with corporate drones on a daily basis, this sale has a bottom line and we aren't seeing it. Corporate business revolves around money, if IMVU can't monetize this site, the content on it, or the people on it, they would not have bought it. Period. This does not mean they're going to steal your artwork or uploads, if I had to guess they are most likely going to aggregate the user data on here in order to use targeted ads on the site as well as sell any email addresses on the site to other ad companies to make a quick buck. Yeah, they claim they aren't, but how would you prove it if they did? That sounds scarier than it actually is, I can almost guarantee other websites you use have already done the exact same thing, your spam folder might collect a few extra emails but other than that you won't be seeing any real difference in the FA experience. Again, that's just speculation.

Then there's the fact that IMVU is a colossal steaming pile of shit. I gave it a try a long time ago, I'm sure things have changed a lot since I tried it, so I looked into the company a bit, Consumer Affairs give them a 1.9 out of 5 stars based on customer reviews. Common Sense Media gave them a 3/5. By far the most interesting to me though was Glassdoor, for those that aren't familiar with it, Glassdoor is a company review website that only takes reviews from employees of the company. Glassdoor gives them a rating of 3.1. McDonald's has a rating of 3 from Glassdoor. That should be pretty telling by itself, but it gets better, while there aren't a ton of reviews for IMVU there are a lot of consistent complaints, namely no clear long term vision or goals for the company, terrible management, an obsession with short term profits, and a shrinking user base. Red flags anyone? Oh wait, there's more, if you look under the interviews section you'll find this gem "According to management they want to grow via acquisition with the final goal being to sell the company to whoever ponies up the cash they want."

Link to the Glassdoor page; http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IM.....ws-E215077.htm

I haven't decided what I want to do yet, but quite frankly, I want nothing to do with IMVU. For the time being I won't be uploading new content here (not that I was particularly active lately anyway), and I'll be taking a mostly wait and see approach however I doubt I'll start uploading here again solely because of my distaste for IMVU, and should things take a turn for the worse I will take down my gallery here all together. I'll still be around watching my account here, but I plan on branching out to other sites such as weasyl and sofurry and possibly resurrecting my defunct deviant art profile. For now, here is a link to my Weasyl; https://www.weasyl.com/~rhet