Apparently Wowhead has been sold to Affinity Media, the same company that currently owns both Allakhazam and Thottbot, as well as being the former owners of IGE.

http://boards.worldofraids.com/topic-5039-1.html
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=344.0

Does anyone else get a bad feeling from this?

Hopefully they'll put the ads on the side so they could be easily ignored but I doubt it. Grats to the developers of Wowhead because it really is an amazing site and earn some cash for it. Hell...I could care less about what people on the internet thinks about me if I get $1 million dollars out of it

So now this company owns three sites which do pretty much the exact same thing.

Guess you could call it "Controlling the Monopol"

I think that for a company that already has a big foundation in place for running database sites, the cost of operating another one would stand in direct relation with the amount of visits it generates. If you then consider any visitors as income in some relation, then gobbling up wowhead in addition to the other two would do nothing but strengthen their position at only minor costs, if any.

Correct me if I'm wrong though, neither network management nor marketing are really my fields of expertise.

The expression is 'couldn't care less'. 'Could care less' makes no freaking sense if your intention is to show indifference.

Is Thottbot?

Every time one of these sites sells, everyone says "Oh no, I have a bad feeling about this...." Is Thottbot or Allakhazam c. 2007 any different from the sites we remember from two years ago? Not really.

Two simple steps to avoid ads:

1) get firefox
2) get adblock http://adblock.mozdev.org/ (and maybe Noscript http://noscript.net/)

Or get Opera, it has an adblock function build in, but I didn't find it as effective.

They're quite different. It no longer takes 30 seconds to a minute for each page load like it did before they got bought.

Wowhead already has advertisements and has had them for some time now by way of gold spamming in comments, non-gold banners and even some annoying voice flash adds now and again(unrelated to wow). Using Firefox hasn't helped me avoid them at all but it doesn't detract from it being a great site.

Do i care ? Not enough to stop using the site until something better comes along and the cycle repeats itself. I stopped giving too much thought about it all after the monkley business drama back in the day.

If I'm not mistaken, Thottbot and Allakhazam both had instances in which their advertisers had unknowingly embedded viruses into their ads. While I use Opera and HOSTS files to control anything I view on the Internet, it's not unreasonable to hold concern that similar trends might begin to be exhibited in WoWHead. I was glad when WoWHead had released itself from its partnership with IGN, but I don't know what to think of this one.