The best answer? It's complicated. 

As far as the site going down forever in the case of those random blackouts, just know that we are nowhere close to that. 

I've been a long time lurker.  I remember coming here around 2006 and there was this guy named Bunkum that would give out vgchartz's sales #'s a few days before the owner put them up.  And there was some saucy girl here that had a mario di.ldo as her avatar way back then.  She thought that bunkum was awesome b/c everybody thought he worked at the NPD group which publishes the market research that vgchartz used for mabey a decade or so.  

I still feel like a big strength of this place is in the sales data in that this is something that few other sites give, so it's a unique strength of vgchartz. Perhaps we could get a writer that has a broad interest in the gaming industry and could give some analysis for the forum. This could be a big help to get people into the sales data again which just isn't something that interests people now. I think that y'all should consider calling up jacob mazel and telling him that you want him back on the team. Just an idea   Pitch him the idea of doing that as a side hustle and he'll be the super nerd that leads the thinking on here.