• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 8, 2011

Online forum operator CrowdGather on Thursday announced the acquisition of community-building platform Yuku. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Per the deal, CrowdGather is getting the domain name, Web site, and assets related to Yuku.com, including the Ezboard domains and its integrated forums, from Inform Technologies, Inc.

In sheer audience terms, CrowdGather expects to add approximately 80 million page views and 8 million monthly unique visitors -- bringing its total network to about 235 million monthly page views, and 23 million monthly unique visitors.

"We add a substantial amount of monthly page views, monthly unique visitors and thousands of hosted micro communities as part of this purchase," said Sanjay Sabnani, CrowdGather Chairman and CEO.

Going forward, "our immediate focus will be to revitalize this platform and to listen to the needs of the members," Sabnani added. Sabnani is also reportedly hoping to apply to a national listing, whether it be on the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, or the American Stock Exchange.

Likely facilitating the deal, publicly traded CrowdGather said it raised $7.85 million back in March. Sabnani said at the time that he planned to use the investment to buy more forums.

With a history of serving, managing and hosting forum communities, Yuku.com includes the once-renowned ezboard.com forum community, which was founded back in 1996. Yuku.com now includes social network features for members and member profiles, along with various tools for forum organizers to manage their sites.

Yuku.com should serve as another platform on which CrowdGather's ad server can execute its vertical integration of ads, added Sabnani.