Ask Paul: March 15 (Premium)

Well, we're back in Pennsylvania and feeling lost. Hopefully, another great set of reader questions can get me back on track. Also, happy Ides of March.
It was a super site
gg1 asks:

I distinctly remember you sharing that you tried to find a way to keep your old content from Penton in a win-win and they wanted to charge you an exorbitant amount.

Yeah, the story there is that Penton had layoffs throughout 2014 and that Fall it finally laid off everyone in Windows IT Pro aside from me and Rod Trent. And while I was told that my job was secure, and that I could just continue doing what I did, there was no way I was going to stay at that company. On their way out the door, one of the accountants secretly forwarded me some internal documentation that showed, among other things, that my referrals and links to the main Windows IT Pro website from the SuperSite for Windows, in particular my weekly UPDATE column, generated some incommensurate amount of its traffic—this sounds impossible now, and maybe I'm misremembering, but I think it was north of 70 percent—and that gave me my first idea for a post-Penton future: Perhaps the company could just give me the SuperSite back—I had sold it to Penton's predecessor in 1999—and I would just continue sending them traffic as a form of payment.

My boss at the time thought this was a fantastic idea—I still recall slowly walking on the treadmill I then I had in my home office as I described this to her—as did her boss. But by the time it got up to the same VP who had laid off all my coworkers, I was told that the SuperSite was "a corporate asset," and that there was no way I could just have it. He told me I would need to pay the company "$1 million" to acquire the site. And so I gave them my two-week notice. After a few meetings with other publishers, I linked up with George at BWW Media Group thanks to Jeff James, a friend and former Penton coworker who had left before the pogroms. And we started Thurrott.com, going live in January 2015.

I was wondering: have you tried broaching the subject again since? It's been almost a decade and they may be more flexible on the subject. For us it'd be great to have all your content in a single place, where it deserves to be.

No, and I won't, sorry. I wouldn't—and couldn't—pay for that content, no matter the price, and I'm sure they're not interested in that kind of divestiture. Nor would it be feasible: What used to be called Windows IT Pro—what started as Windows NT Magazine—is long gone and the resulting site, IT Pro Today, is an amalgam of content from many previous sites that would be impossible to separate out accurately. After all, the content I wrote wasn't just in the SuperSite, a ton of it was in Windows IT Pro proper, and some was in other publications like SQL Server Magazine, Connected Home Magazine, and others that I never owned. There's no way to separate it out.

Most of it is horribly out of date, of course, but from ...