I don't understand what the money buys you. Just fork it, set up a new Hackaday and raise money for a specific purpose. Not to make the people behind the original site rich.
I guess the money here buys you the domain name but more importantly the traffic associated to it. If you fork it, you need to do a lot of SEO and hope that one day you hit the stats of hackaday.
So I figured, but my stance is that in the long run the repute and traffic would not matter. I'm more in favor of the OSS-mentatlity: fork it. I've never believed in crowd-sourcing funding for a buyout as I have little faith in the that the market is working when the buyer is not paying out of his own pocket and after all you're only exchanging one private owner for another.
community is "direct traffic" only, I'm don't know what % of their traffic is organic but I assumed it's a huge chunk. Having the community following you to the new site is one thing (assuming you're able to make it known to all of them without access to the original site's twitter account/newsletter...) but it really solves a small part of the problem.
