Last August, Cmdr Taco, the legendary founder of the site, left Slashdot, one of the most respected geek sites on the web, after 15 years at the helm. So why would Geeknet - its owner - want to sell it alongside Sourceforge and Freecode?

Well, for a start, the company has been losing money for a while (only two profitable quarters out of the last nine) and has introduced two of verticals in lucrative markets (Slashcloud and Slashbi) only a few weeks ago in order to monetise its audience.

However, a quick glance at the feedback on the articles show that it is not attracting as much attention as Geeknet would have wished. The Twitter accounts of both verticals have a cumulative total of under 200 followers.

For a start, only a fraction of the thousands or so comments on the site land on these verticals, a sign perhaps that the venture doesn't necessarily sit well with the core audience at Slashdot to say the least, given how eclectic and often anticonventional some of them may be.

It's worth noting that we submitted the press release of the announcement by Geeknet that it was exploring strategic alternatives to offload its online media business to Slashdot. After rapidly becoming popular on the site, it disappeared suddenly.

What does the future bode for Slashdot and its two sister sites? The cost of running them appear to be weighing heavily on Geeknet's accounts. It is likely that, if no alternatives are found, cost reduction and efficiency drives could be introduced.