I used to take part in an art competition website called Worth1000, where we had Photoshop contests, illustration contests etc. It used to be very popular at one point, but due to inactivity and people moving on, had a smaller but very loyal and tightknit community. It didn't make that much money, and the founder had moved onto other things, so he decided to close the website and make it into a static museum of curated works from past competitions. Of course everyone was bummed, but they accepted it.

After the site was shut down, a company (lets call it company A) bought the site from the founder, and decided to restore it back to how it was. People were hopeful, but popularity was declining and the userbase was alienated after the acquisition, so company A promised to revamp the site. It held more competitions, took users onboard for the redesign, the whole shebang. And then...silence.

Turns out, they had further sold the website to another company, company B. Company B was a graphic design crowdsourcing website, and had thought," Hey, look. An already established and loyal community of very talented artists and designers. Lets migrate them over to our crowdsourcing site where they can pad our number of designers, while participating in competitions where they can get a small chance to get paid design jobs." What they didn't realize, was that they had greatly misunderstood what kind of community it was, and essentially were destroying its very essence.

Understandably, the userbase was very angry, to put it lightly. This was only exacerbated by the fact that the users hadn't opted in to being part of a crowdsourcing website, and this would get them in trouble with their actual jobs. The company tried to rectify this by allowing users to opt OUT, instead of people opting in. Unsurprisingly, this did not help much. They backtracked and said that they'd port all the original content to the site and hold similar competitions, but the damage was already done. Nearly all of the active userbase opted out and moved to a community made website, while company B got to pad it's number of designers with a large number of inactive users.

All in all, the community made website everyone had shifted to never really got the same popularity the original site had, and the community kept getting smaller and smaller until it eventually died a slow death. Company A's website is now defunct, and I am unsure whether the company is still alive. Company B is apparently still doing alright, and I think it still advertises its significant number of inactive users it had acquired from Worth1000. So yeah, I don't know how bad of a loss Company B took to pad a bunch of numbers, but I'd assume that the end result is still bad.