In June, three MySpace executives left to start Blue Rover Labs. Another blog broke the news, here. We’ve since done some some sleuthing and think we may know what they are up to.

After browsing some of the founders’ twitter profiles we noticed a connection related to another LA based company called Crowdgather. Crowdgather runs communities built around message boards and forums. As of September 30, 2008, Crowdgather was serving over 16.5 million page views and reaching 1.9 million unique users monthly.

Our hunch is that these executives are building a way to monetize forums, starting initially with the inventory provided by Crowdgather’s network. It is a wise approach to a segmented and proven portion of the web. Forums are essentially communities around a certain topic which can be leveraged in an ad-network type fashion in aggregate. Typically stand-alone forum sites cannot obtain significant reach above and beyond the niche that they cover. However, if an ad network sits on top of a hundreds or even thousands of forums, then you have quite a business and can charge higher CPMs and everyone benefits.

Lastly, it looks like Crowdgather could use some assistance as they are currently public and traded over the counter. Last time we checked the stock was trading @$1.23 per share. Here is a link to Crowdgather’s Annual Report: (Annual Report for Crowdgather)