cinemageddon is indeed an excellent example.
-spot a niche
-built up a dedicated community without being rare or elite
-offer unique content that you won't find anywhere else
that's what they did and they were successful.
agreed with your bullet points.
- scene trackers don't really work thesedays, we have enough of them. What we need is delicated tracker which specify on certain subject of interest. In my observation, delicated trackers like cinemageddon, aom, xtreme wrestling torrents, thehorrorcharnel, karagara etc have 100x better community than most scene tracker. Those trackers have new faces in forum, irc, and the whole community itself. On the other hand for scene tracker, you will find same person posting in 10 different trackers...and idling at 10 different IRCs. Pointless imo.
- Cinemageddon was always open sign up, yet i always found the forum extremely helpful (during my stay that is). I invited ~10 people from Cinemageddon to The Horror Charnel and i think ~5 of them made it info superuser like myself (superuser class back then was assigned by mod btw). Later on, i invited couple of people from here, probably like 10, i would say almost all of them idled their account...like forever =/
My point is that "community" can be build up even in a open signup tracker or even in easy-to-get-an-invite tracker like The Horror Charnel.
- Cinemageddon had so many unique stuff. They used to have 100% freeleech for all projects (they later made it partial freeleech later on btw), bonus point gamble...and not to mention that all staRAB were uber friendly!!!
I would always welcome trackers like Cinemageddon anyday, but another scene tracker, puff.