Launched in February 1998 by John Breslin, a researcher in NUI Galway, for years it served as Ireland’s public square, and its 70,000 daily users made it one of the country’s most popular websites. There were huge surges in online traffic on 9/11 and on the day broadcaster Gerry Ryan died in 2010.
Fans of the forum would also claim that Boards.ie was responsible for multiple marriages and births, due to social meet-ups among regular posters.
The forum had lost users and traffic after it migrated from its legacy platform to Vanilla three years ago, but the owners credited the move for keeping it in business.
“Thanks to significant cash investment and huge effort from the team, we brought the business to break-even and gave ourselves a window to stabilise,” the administrator said in a post on the site.
“However, recent changes to Google’s algorithm have had a dramatic impact, cutting our traffic in half almost overnight – and with it, our ad revenue. These changes, part of Google’s March 2025 update, have hit many community-driven sites hard, including Boards.ie. As a result, we’ve been pushed into an unsustainable position.”
The forum is now at a crossroads, the administrator said, and without a change to its financial position in the coming weeks “we will be forced to shut down”.
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – July 10th
Boards.ie is introducing an ad-free membership option, in the hope that paid subscriptions can cover its running costs. If this happens, the aim is to remove ads from the forum.
The price of a monthly subscription will be €5, and for a year the cost will be €50. The administrators say they are aiming for 2,000 paying subscribers.
“As the world shifts toward AI, we believe Boards.ie’s role as Ireland’s online voice is more important than ever,” the administrator adds. “Traffic is already a quarter of what it once was. For any business that depends on traffic and advertising revenue to survive, time is running out – and we’re no exception.”
The forum administrator says there is only a “short window” to make the subscription work. If it doesn’t, “we will have no choice but to close the site in the months ahead – something we truly hope to avoid”.
It is understood there are just two employees working on boards.ie, whose current ownership structure is unclear. The site has been majority owned by Distilled Media, which operates the Journal and owns 50pc of Daft.ie property website, with a minority stake being held by some of the original founders,
At the time of its merger with The Journal Media in 2018, Boards.ie had assets of €0.36m and liabilities of €0.2m.
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