So, he is the "owner" then?

Just curious.... thought maybe it was a consortium of vendors, who set the rules, and shared the costs/profits.

Correct, Titus is the sole owner, not affiliated with any product or supplier. Revenues collected by him, as Canreef, go into the operation of the site and I suppose his time allocated to that activity.

It's a business! Good for him. I'm not too sure why this is so bad? Hopefully Titus makes a bundle of cash!

Who says it is bad? Business and making money is good.... Wouldn't be able to afford this crazy hobby otherwise....

agreed!

I can throw a little light on this as a vendor, who spends money with these sites.

The only site I have had negative experience with was ReefCentral. I was actually in discussions with them to setup a sponsorship agreement. Its really expensive minimum $500 a month. Before the agreement was completed a few people had stumbled across my site and were discussing on the boards. I even had a customer post some pictures of Modular LED stuff. All of the posts were removed, and one customer was banned. Their other LED sponsor had an existing agreement and we were not setup yet. I complained about this; that it seemed weird to me people were only permitted to discuss LED if it was related to one of their sponsors. Their reaction was to ban me and our pending agreement was terminated.

As for ReefBuilders. They did a unsolicited review for us and it was not paid for. I had a great experience with them.
http://reefbuilders.com/2011/09/29/m...asy-diy-demon/

I have not had any other problems with any other sites. Most are pretty reasonable, you get a sponsor forum and a banner ad. Its like any advertising, you have to pay for it.

ReefCentral is the only one I came across where it is a total capitalist system were you cannot discuss items if there is a competing sponsor.

I've heard of these negative experiences from other vendors in regards to ReefCentral as well. Not the same issue as you, but varying disagreements.

on the flip side when I was trying to sell t-shirts reefbuilders did a blurb on me free of charge and reef-central offered to give me a discounted rate.

thats cuz everybody loves "Fishbrains"

I do really like the new rule that if you get free/discounted merchandise you have to claim it in your blog review. There are still positive/negative reviews on everything, but having that out there seems to make me feel a little better about the "advertising" side of a lot of the reviews.