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Amazing, a top 500 global site (roughly), that appears likely to just close up shop. What the hell is that? Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we
by shingen 15y ago
Amazing, a top 500 global site (roughly), that appears likely to just close up shop. What the hell is that?
Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we'll split 50/50 anything I make with it, I'll assume all the downside liability.
Posterous can go a lot further. This is a failure of imagination.
- desireco42 15y agoAgreed
- chintan 15y agohttps://www.quantcast.com/posterous.com https://www.quantcast.com/posterous.com Although this is just a subset of their total traffic, they were consistently doubling traffic every 4 months or so.
- shingen 15y agoYep, it had a very real business opportunity. It really does make me want to take a run at getting the platform from Twitter, if they are in fact going to close it down. I've got the perfect name to rebrand it with, far better than the Posterous name. Twitter might see serious tax benefits from shutting it down after the acquisition unfortunately. To them it might be worth more dead than alive.
- wavephorm 15y agoYep, it had a very real business opportunity. Obviously the founders knew otherwise. They saw how difficult it would be to go for the long haul, and calculated it would be better just to take the Twitter job offers.
- shingen 15y agoIt'd be the first time founders were wrong, right? Obviously once Posterous took the A & B $10 million in venture funding, their clock was seriously ticking. The founders no longer had real control over the company or its future. It wouldn't surprise me if they were diluted down to 10% or less ownership each, which wipes out the incentive to continue with a situation where you're going to see nearly zero payout due to VC terms unless you build an absolute monster company. No matter what they did, due to the VC they took on, they were unlikely to have a long term time horizon unless they were 'beating' Tumblr. It was get extraordinarily big or go home, because apparently #500 wasn't big enough. So they bailed, and it probably made perfect sense for their situations.
- robryan 15y agoI got the feeling that despite being somewhat different to tumblr they were on somewhat of a race with them. They were losing that badly so they kind of reinvented with spaces. I think the tumblr model is certainly more mass market and on the absence of a business model that is turning in more than probably cents per user per year your going to need a crazy large userbase.
- minikomi 15y agoJust an aside.. Any idea what the huge spike on Aug 23rd 2010 was? edit: seems the relaunched with a new design around that time
- brk 15y agoLet's say they do give you the platform... What do you think the care of feeding of the servers cost?
- shingen 15y agoA monetized Posterous could be run on 100 or less servers. Tumblr runs on perhaps 1,500x according to High Scalability, and it's at least a few hundred times more nasty than Posterous in terms of server thrasing (pageviews and hits on the data via the dash). Tumblr daily pageviews: 500m; Posterous daily pageviews: 1m Posterous would never be a billion dollar service, but it could be the type of service that generates $10m+ in annual profit. 100 servers from a competent host + bandwidth via a pooling deal = less than $50,000 per month. It wouldn't be sexy, but it'd hold. I wouldn't keep the current Posterous business model of chasing Tumblr into a pool of red ink. I'd place a bet that users will pay for a service that will stick around. It would reduce usage, but there's a large base to monetize that would be willing to stick around.
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoUh, what? 1m pageviews a month is about equivalent to 10/second. A single app server can handle that easily. Add on a redundant app server, two database servers, and some static/queue/mail ones, and you're looking at 10 servers _tops_ for that level of traffic (and much more).