18 ms·

Gigaom Closes Down

372 points by petercooper 12y ago

antr 12y ago
Any insight why? I'm guessing ad revenue is down, not enough traffic, etc. But more light on why Gigaom shutting down would be of value.
- gkoberger 12y ago
  "It has run out of money" https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512
- petercooper 12y ago
  I have no inside knowledge (other than being in publishing generally) but they're in a hot space with relatively good advertising opportunities right now, they also run events which should, in theory, be quite profitable. My totally unfounded theory/opinion is they were overfunded and the investors wanted to get out after not seeing the growth levels they wanted (which in publishing is not a big surprise, you almost never see SaaS or consumer app levels of growth there).
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  LinkedIn blogs and news feed? That would be my guess.
pc2g4d 12y ago
Really??
gkoberger 12y ago
GigaOM (or, Gigaom, given the rebranding following Om's departure) was my first internship in SF. I always really respected Om. While often to the detriment of Gigaom's bottom line and readership numbers, Om was adamant about avoiding controversy and clickbait. I was always proud to say I worked at Gigaom. Really sad to see it go.
duck 12y ago
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is-shutting-down/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is...
el_duderino 12y ago
I'm not too surprised. I feel as if they've fallen off the radar in the past couple of years.
- ausjke 12y ago
  Same here, I used to read it but not much so in the last couple of years, probably ever since I started to read on HN.
- nailer 12y ago
  Om had a great video show on, IIRC, Revision3 years ago (back before YouTube was used so regularly for these kinds of things). I used to watch it religiously. It's such a shame tech industry news (as opposed to tech news) got taken over by Gawker, Pando and other clickbait sites.
petercooper 12y ago
https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/ https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/
- austenallred 12y ago
  > Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. Sounds like a fairly hostile takeover that no one was expecting. I wouldn't be surprised to see something very similar be spun out of it, perhaps not bearing the name of the departed founder.
  - iand 12y ago
    More likely the company had debts it couldn't service
    - teej 12y ago
      I think the phrasing "in full" is important here. It implies that a debt was "called in" and thus something more political is at play. I don't think this means they couldn't pay their bills. I wonder if venture debt is involved.
pjbrunet 12y ago
That's one problem naming a business after a person. Still the domain is worth something. No sense "parking" a domain like that.
petercooper 12y ago
My personal take is that Gigaom will be sorely missed. They've had some top notch writers and they've put out a lot of great stuff lately. But.. they've also had several funding rounds over the past 8 years and when you take $20m+ over 8 years and you can't hit a crazy level of growth, the VC grim reaper rears its ugly head.
stephenc_c_ 12y ago
Further confirmation: http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom-closes-down/ http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-giga...
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks. Since that has more information, we changed the url to it from https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512. If someone suggests a better url we can change it again.
andrewchoi 12y ago
While some of the podcasts seemed to be a bit fluffy, I always appreciated the Structure Show as a survey of where infrastructure software was. Any suggestions of similarly aimed content to subscribe to?
mintplant 12y ago
Om Malik just published "A Statement about Gigaom" to his personal blog. http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/ http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/
hackuser 12y ago
There are so many tech publications, and I never knew why I should read Gigaom instead of others. Perhaps that's one reason they didn't attract enough revenue. Can anyone answer that question? Even better: Can anyone advise what publications they would read if they were interested in innovations in technologies and in their applications, rather than in products? That is, I'm interested in innovations or developments like IoT or blockchain or HTTP/2, and innovative ways to utilize them. Generally I'm not interested in something like the latest MacBook Air; it's significant in the marketplace, but for my purposes it only marginally improves and repackages existing tech.
- nashequilibrium 12y ago
  http://www.fastcompany.com/section/technovore http://www.fastcompany.com/section/technovore I have visited his writings in the above link more than the actual Gigaom site. One thing i will say, is that there are some really talented journalists at Gigaom.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    That is excellent, thanks. (If you happen to know an address for an RSS feed of Technovore, I'd be very appreciative. Fast Company seems to offer only their entire site's headlines (http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/headlines http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/headlines), which has too poor signal-to-noise to add to my feeds.) EDIT: Nevermind, found it: http://www.fastcompany.com/user/om-malik.rss http://www.fastcompany.com/user/om-malik.rss
- softdev12 12y ago
  I read a bunch of different tech sites, but it my opinion, the most relevant stuff is on HN. It basically aggregates all the best stuff from all the tech publications anyway, so you are probably just as well off in the end. Of course, if you want to read more academic articles per se, stick to the big science publications like Nature, etc. Here's a list in no particular order: 1) recode 2) pando daily 3) techcrunch 4) techmeme (another good aggregator) 5) Mit tech review 6) New York Times Bits 7) WSJ D 8) CNET 9) Mashable
treelovinhippie 12y ago
After receiving $8m in funding 12 months ago: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...
- BallinBige 12y ago
  im sure it was traunched. god i hope so.. actually no i dont, dumb money
- djloche 12y ago
  They tried to pivot, raised a bunch of money, hired 70+ people, and likely burned through it all.
  - chx 12y ago
    Any source on the 70+ people?
    - jeromegv 12y ago
      Here it is: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...
ripb 12y ago
Is it just me or does there seem to be significantly more of a recode.net presence on HN at the moment? I hadn't heard of the site until recently and now I've seen a few fairly low-brow articles from it on the front page here in the last 24 hours.
- dang 12y ago
  I looked at the data and am pretty sure it's just random fluctuation. If there's a higher-brow article on this story we'll happily change the url.
- shortformblog 12y ago
  Recode automatically has rep here because it's run by the main principals of the old WSJ site AllThingsD. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg earned their rep—ReCode is just keeping it alive.
crystaln 12y ago
Could this be a canary for the end of this investment cycle?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kra34 12y ago
How does a tech company run out of money? Isn't this where some VC steps in with a billion dollar valuation for the series G round?
- doctorshady 12y ago
  Don't be ridiculous, the written word is worthless. Nobody is going to visit a site that makes you read more then a paragraph.
- pkaye 12y ago
  I don't think they are a tech company.
walterbell 12y ago
Thanks to Mathew Ingram for his valiant articles and twitter commentary on journalism ethics. Maybe he will consider following the Ben Thompson / stratechery business model.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  The Globe and Mail could use his abilities again too, I'm sure.
sremani 12y ago
I time to time read gigaom, the articles were mostly somber devoid of sensationalism, I will sorely miss gigaom.
jallmann 12y ago
Damn. I read Gigaom regularly, really appreciated the straight up news. It will be missed. Gigaom had an excellent writing staff, hope they get back on their feet quickly so we can keep reading their pieces.
shortformblog 12y ago
I'm pretty surprised by this, particularly in part because their events business seemed robust. My company sent me to an event of theirs in NYC two years ago, and it had a very high caliber of presenters/panelists (David Karp, Andrew Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, a few others). The tickets also weren't cheap. Sure, the company didn't go down the clickbait road, but it also had come up with revenue models that made up for that. Beyond events, they also had a research group—something that, to a degree, arguably made their real competition Gartner and Forrester. I wonder what role Om stepping away from the day-to-day played in this. What he said a year ago makes this turn of events seem shocking: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...
- frabcus 12y ago
  I went to, probably the same, (big data) Gigaom event. I really enjoyed it - good people and talks. There weren't, however, many customers there. It was all other people selling stuff. So I didn't go again. The recent wave of data related businesses are now generally at the phase where they need to meet potential customers from corporates at events. Not sure how/if this affects business model though! The profitability of events is opaque to me.
ilamont 12y ago
I thought they were on much more solid footing, considering the funding last year and the very strong talent in their ranks. For instance, Laura Hazard Owen is one of the best reporters covering the ebook industry. This could be a sign of things to come for other online pubs once the funding runs out. Too much competition, too little in the way of sustainable revenue sources, and not enough AOL acquisition cash to go around.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This is sad, and not entirely unexpected. Look for a large number of websites to go under just like Gigaom. Oddly enough, the reason these folks are failing is that Google's CPC (the money they get for an advertising "click") has gone down Year over Year for the last 13 quarters. What that means is that if your web site depended on advertising from Google (and most do), and your traffic remained constant, you have seen a 33% drop in gross revenue over that same period. Google doesn't call out their click fraud numbers, but they do improve their ability to detect it over time, which means your "quality" click through rate has been going down as well, for a double whammy. So unless you can improve volume, you die. In their Q4 report[1] they make this note: Network paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on non-Google properties participating in our AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, and AdMob businesses, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 7% over the third quarter of 2014. A third less advertising revenue on a 11% fewer clicks over all? Serious pain. As of the fourth quarter, Google also mentions it is paying nearly a billion dollars a quarter ($968M) to get search traffic. If you're a GigaOm and your traffic is already generating less revenue and fewer clicks are getting through, you can't really add insult to injury by paying people to send you traffic. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings....
- petercooper 12y ago
  I've seen YouTubers complaining about this too. One I follow (who has over 2m subscribers) says his views are up strongly in the past year (as in over 50% more) but his income has fallen by a third.
  - neurotech1 12y ago
    On a popular space webcast, TMRO, the host mentioned their YouTube revenue was a "rounding error" compared to their revenue through Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/tmro https://www.patreon.com/tmro). They get $1000+ per episode.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    When did YouTube start using these really annoying video ads? Because it seem at that point that my non-technical aquentiences started to install adblockers. And it seems that youtube users use Patreon now.
andrewbinstock 12y ago
This is part of a trend that's just starting. I was the editor in chief at Dr. Dobb's, which many of you know closed down in December. As I explained in my farewell editorial [1], our ad sales were squeezed by a comparatively recent phenomenon in media, which is a very steep drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads--a lifeline for most web sites. The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively nobody ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad. For certain consumer sites, that's a survivable problem. For example, Budweiser's ads aren't intended to make a sale, but rather to remind people of the brand. However, for many tech companies (those that aren't tier 1), they don't have the funds to do brand-oriented ads. Their ads need to result in clicks and purchases. And that's just not happening on pure websites. (FB and Twitter are a wholly different category.) Personally, I expect that more web sites in the tech sector that have depended in the past on advertising will either fail or drastically cut back on their offerings. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421 http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421
- vonnik 12y ago
  Great comment. As part of the marketing team at a well funded but very money-conscious startup, I can confirm this awareness that most web ads have no visible effect on the bottom line, or the cost of customer acquisition is so high as to be prohibitive. On the web, people are overwhelmed with marketing messages. It's very hard to find the right demographic, and then to convince them to act. This has always been true, but it has become much more measurable since the Internet came along. Unless you are a large corporation with the belief that "branding" can be bought, and the budget to back it up, there's no reason to buy online ads in most venues.
  - rsync 12y ago
    Can you (or andrewbinstock) comment with regard to google adwords ? I don't think of those as the same thing as banner ads ...
    - Scoundreller 12y ago
      As a (very) small-time publisher, but with a fairly reasonable sample over the years, CPM ads pay about 1/5th what CPC ads do. I think that shows how much "brand awareness" versus "I'm trying to make a sale" advertising is worth. Edit: CPM pays 1/3rd the rate, but CPC ads make up 90% of revenue, which makes sense if they generally pay more. I run a rather diverse set of sites, but I stay away from tech.
cookrn 12y ago
I think one of Om's earliest blogs (may have even been an acquisition) was about being a digital nomad. I was just getting in to tech/startup news at the time and for whatever reason, that one stuck out to me. (Can anyone find a link?) I've always enjoyed reading their content over the years and will be sad to see them go.
juanmnl 12y ago
First guess, they didn't take the native advertising wave, losing thousands per article to cough cough Techcrunch-likes cough cough
kevinastone 12y ago
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway
ulfw 12y ago
Another one bites the dust. Pity.
ilamont 12y ago
From the GigaOm media kit (1) Display advertising: Charging $35-$45 CPMs, depending on the channel. Rates dependent on campaign duration, budget and targeting. 300x250, 300x600 and 970x250 ad units available. Flipboard campaign: $55 CPM, over 1.5 million readers/month "1-week channel takeover" - Gigaom homepage channel (1M+ impressions per week) $22K per week - includes two sponsored posts. Mobile channel $15k, cloud $8k. Sponsored posts: $3,000 250-word sponsored post $5,000 800-word sponsored post Event sponsorships: $5K–$85K Research: Annual cost appears to be $10k 1. https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-media-kit-v3.pdf https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-medi...
manigandham 12y ago
I've worked in the adtech industry for years and now run a new company focused on content/native ads. Online advertising is a vast and complicated ecosystem with hundreds of companies and lots of politics but all this is to say that sites like Gigaom failing are almost never just down to simple factors as "ads pay less". Some points on online advertising itself though, in random order: - Overall pageviews online are up, a lot. More people are online now and with more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, even tvs). - Ad blockers (depending on the site) can be anywhere from 10-50% of users. - Desktop is now the minority, usually about 35% of traffic. - Ad blockers are mostly on desktop, so while they are making an impact, it's somewhat minimized by the shift to mobile. - Ad blockers are also mostly run by corporations that make money and most allow companies to buy exceptions (Google does this, along with all those recommended links guys like Outbrain, Taboola and dozens of others. To be perfectly honest, we're trying to get on this list as well.) - There's a difference between branding/awareness campaigns (like for GE) vs performance campaigns (like for Newegg). Awareness is about getting you to recognize, remember, engage with and otherwise think about the brand. Especially important for B2B/enterprise and other companies that don't have things for consumers to buy, or even cheap enough for mainstream. Performance is all about getting a click, or these days even a signup, purchase or some other "action". - The ability of digital advertising to track things to such a granular level has made everything more efficient, driving down prices to a few cents per click in some cases. The ads you see on a webpage have gone through an entire auction process with dozens of bidders in about 100 milliseconds before you ever see anything. - Fraud is a huge issue along with viewability (whether an ad actually shows up inside the browser window vs. never being scrolled into view, inactive tab, etc). Early studies have pegged fraud/viewability problems at almost 50% although this is rapidly going down with new companies and standards. Nobody wants fraud and it's a constant arms race. - There are lots of ad types, everything from display (banners) to rich media (interstitials, popups, expanding/moving/interactive stuff), to native ads, to video, to email, and more. They all work on different parts of the "sales funnel" and there are different strategies in place. One of the biggest is called retargeting. It's when you visit a site then see ads for that same company across the web, even days or weeks later. It's all about making you remember and come back to learn more, buy something, etc. And it works really well. - Display ads do work. While everyone seems to think that they won't ever click on a banner, Google sees hundreds of millions of clicks a day. Those recommended widgets get tens of millions of clicks a day. Ads work, whether you want to believe it or not, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist. Those billboards on the side of a freeway are far more expensive than small campaigns online but they're still bought because you can measure the effect before and after and see a measurable increase in whatever you're interested in. - People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain about being tracked. Trust me, ad networks want to get you the best ads as possible. Showing you what you're interested helps everyone. But we can't know who you are, what you've seen or anything else if we can't track you in some way. And for those who are worried about privacy, for all the legit ad platforms, you're nothing more than a randomized id number. Not personal information. If you're worried about that, then stay off Facebook where most people willingly give all their info. - Most advertising is being shifted to be bought on audiences rather than sites. Native ads are shifting this back somewhat but most modern platforms work by selling audience segments primarily, so as an advertiser you would run a campaign targeting 18-25 males interested in sports for example. Doesn't matter what site, as long as the audience matches and this is facilitated by the efficiency of running the aforementioned auctions (called RTB for Real-Time Bidding). - While privacy is important, there's an arms race with tracking because advertisers want this audience access. The recent issue with cookies has only made tech companies even better at tracking and there are entire sub-industries dedicated to tracking people across all of their devices. We can do this today. And it will only get better. Again the intentions are to get you better ads but if you're worried about privacy, just be aware that it's not that easy to "hide". --- If you've read this far, I hope that helped give some insight into online ads. I'm sorry I can't give exact sources as this is data that comes our ad network and it's not published anywhere, but we do have global coverage and this is very accurate in the US/European region. Disclaimer again: I run https://instinctive.io https://instinctive.io but feel free to email/message if you want more info.
damonpace 12y ago
You can build a lean website on CPC advertising...but it's hard to build a real business based on that. Advertising should be viewed as supplemental revenue, rather than the main business model. I assume that's why GigaOm began to shift over to the subscription model. It could also be one of the reasons Google just came out with the "Contributors" beta last week. They may have realized the CPC ad model does not pay enough and content creators need better business models to make it worth their time.
feybay 12y ago
I wasn't a heavy reader of the site, but it always struck me as very fact-oriented and professional. That's too bad to hear.
halayli 12y ago
maybe it's time for paid subscription model?
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  I'm leaning to something closer to a patron / member model, though with most content generally available. We're seeing a reprise of earlier forms of media. Truth is: there is a social (and business) need for quality and reasonably unbiased information. There's also value to those who want to control such a feed (the dark side of media). Advertising has sustained the concept in some form or another for several hundred years, with a few big shake-ups. But there've also be (and continue to be) highly ideological organizations (see Fox News / NewsCorp / WSJ, well know, but also The Economist, and on the left, papers such as The Guardian, Mother Jones, or The Christian Science Monitor). The problem, in an online era, of subscriptions only is that it closes your distribution down too much. Providing early access might be a way around that, though information tends to get out very, very quickly. Of numerous bad options, it strikes me as one of the less-bad (see LWN.net which uses it). Another is partnering with someone who has a clear interest in your demographic -- DICE buying Slashdot, for example, though that doesn't seem to be going all too well from either a content or business stand point so far as I can tell. Hacker News follows the same model, more successfully (on both grounds) via Ycombinator. Advertising, though, seems to me a dead end. And it's going to be all kinds of hurt for the current iteration of Silicon Valley if it plays out as I suspect it will.
buyx 12y ago
With "dead tree" publications dying, and online ad supported publishing not being lucrative, how will the demand for content be satisfied? Here in South Africa, our newspapers and magazines are in steep decline (but still profitable), and it seems everyone under 35 gets their news from ad-supported websites that are probably losing money. Perhaps Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos were ahead of the curve. People may yet turn back to more traditional news sources, even if they are delivered via more modern mediums, such as tablets, if web advertising supported sites die.
shubhamjain 12y ago
> Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a story book ending. Quite daunting. Everyone hears the success stories and dreams of doing the same, or maybe even better but most fail. The reason I believe people push themselves to entrepreneurship is they ask themselves - "Why can't we? We are as smart as them and we have all the knowledge before us". Failure sucks and not everyone is capable of handling it in a positive way - "So what, I'll do better next time. I won't quit.". Perhaps, what scares me the most from my own 'business adventure'.
mercurial 12y ago
One idea for a business would be being a subscription service. Partner with some big names, which already offer/consider offering subscriptions. Users select a monthly payment, and tick boxes for the websites they want to support. Much less hassle than subscribing to each and every website which wants/needs your money. Maybe with an RSS feed aggregating content from your selection.
Angostura 12y ago
Another triumph for Adblock
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Adblock is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Advertising itself is hostile to quality content and good practices.
pknerd 12y ago
Many people discussed that it happened due to Adblocker. If that's true then how sites like Mashable and Techcrunch still surviving?
- strictnein 12y ago
  Mashable isn't a tech site any more, really, so their target market doesn't use Adblock as much. It's a bad HuffPo / BuzzFeed clone. Started when they took funding two years ago and has gone way downhill ever since.
muyuu 12y ago
70 people full time? that sounds like an awful lot. If these are SanFran salaries then their running costs are already immense without even considering other running costs. Cannot a site like this be ran by 10-15 people? Maybe I'm missing where the labour is going.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  They probably needed a few people for events.
bonn1 12y ago
With 'more than 6.5 million monthly' they should do between 50K - 200K/m depending on the bizdev and sales skills. 50K is not enough to keep operations running, 100K would work with editors from low-wage countries. But still a bit odd that they ran out of money.
gitdude 12y ago
The long-term solution is to form a consortium of online media and charge a monthly subscription fee of $9.99/month or so. (Tech media comes together: techcrunch, venturebeat, recode, etc.) Having individual paywalls will not incentivize readers to pay an annual subscription fee. And then the revenue can be split between various media outlets.
gesman 12y ago
I had pretty good click-to-buy success but only at a narrow subject, dedicate vertical sites. In other words selling backup software to the readers of data backup tech site. GigaOM is a wide subject site and only brand awareness ads would make sense. For click-my-ad-to-buy-my-stuff hopeful advertiser - it's a waste of money.
damm 12y ago
Unfortunately their paid-wall model of content really didn't work. When Gigom went into the multi-site model the fragmentation (and the quality) went down hill They tried to resurrect it but the damage was done

372 points by petercooper 12y ago

antr 12y ago

Any insight why? I'm guessing ad revenue is down, not enough traffic, etc. But more light on why Gigaom shutting down would be of value.

gkoberger 12y ago
"It has run out of money" https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512
petercooper 12y ago
I have no inside knowledge (other than being in publishing generally) but they're in a hot space with relatively good advertising opportunities right now, they also run events which should, in theory, be quite profitable. My totally unfounded theory/opinion is they were overfunded and the investors wanted to get out after not seeing the growth levels they wanted (which in publishing is not a big surprise, you almost never see SaaS or consumer app levels of growth there).
pjbrunet 12y ago
LinkedIn blogs and news feed? That would be my guess.

pc2g4d 12y ago

Really??

gkoberger 12y ago

GigaOM (or, Gigaom, given the rebranding following Om's departure) was my first internship in SF. I always really respected Om. While often to the detriment of Gigaom's bottom line and readership numbers, Om was adamant about avoiding controversy and clickbait. I was always proud to say I worked at Gigaom. Really sad to see it go.

duck 12y ago

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is-shutting-down/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is...

el_duderino 12y ago

I'm not too surprised. I feel as if they've fallen off the radar in the past couple of years.

ausjke 12y ago
Same here, I used to read it but not much so in the last couple of years, probably ever since I started to read on HN.
nailer 12y ago
Om had a great video show on, IIRC, Revision3 years ago (back before YouTube was used so regularly for these kinds of things). I used to watch it religiously. It's such a shame tech industry news (as opposed to tech news) got taken over by Gawker, Pando and other clickbait sites.

petercooper 12y ago

https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/ https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/

austenallred 12y ago
> Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. Sounds like a fairly hostile takeover that no one was expecting. I wouldn't be surprised to see something very similar be spun out of it, perhaps not bearing the name of the departed founder.
- iand 12y ago
  More likely the company had debts it couldn't service
  - teej 12y ago
    I think the phrasing "in full" is important here. It implies that a debt was "called in" and thus something more political is at play. I don't think this means they couldn't pay their bills. I wonder if venture debt is involved.

pjbrunet 12y ago

That's one problem naming a business after a person. Still the domain is worth something. No sense "parking" a domain like that.

petercooper 12y ago

My personal take is that Gigaom will be sorely missed. They've had some top notch writers and they've put out a lot of great stuff lately. But.. they've also had several funding rounds over the past 8 years and when you take $20m+ over 8 years and you can't hit a crazy level of growth, the VC grim reaper rears its ugly head.

stephenc_c_ 12y ago

Further confirmation: http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom-closes-down/ http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-giga...

dang 12y ago
Thanks. Since that has more information, we changed the url to it from https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512. If someone suggests a better url we can change it again.

andrewchoi 12y ago

While some of the podcasts seemed to be a bit fluffy, I always appreciated the Structure Show as a survey of where infrastructure software was. Any suggestions of similarly aimed content to subscribe to?

mintplant 12y ago

Om Malik just published "A Statement about Gigaom" to his personal blog. http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/ http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/

hackuser 12y ago

There are so many tech publications, and I never knew why I should read Gigaom instead of others. Perhaps that's one reason they didn't attract enough revenue. Can anyone answer that question? Even better: Can anyone advise what publications they would read if they were interested in innovations in technologies and in their applications, rather than in products? That is, I'm interested in innovations or developments like IoT or blockchain or HTTP/2, and innovative ways to utilize them. Generally I'm not interested in something like the latest MacBook Air; it's significant in the marketplace, but for my purposes it only marginally improves and repackages existing tech.

nashequilibrium 12y ago
http://www.fastcompany.com/section/technovore http://www.fastcompany.com/section/technovore I have visited his writings in the above link more than the actual Gigaom site. One thing i will say, is that there are some really talented journalists at Gigaom.
- hackuser 12y ago
  That is excellent, thanks. (If you happen to know an address for an RSS feed of Technovore, I'd be very appreciative. Fast Company seems to offer only their entire site's headlines (http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/headlines http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/headlines), which has too poor signal-to-noise to add to my feeds.) EDIT: Nevermind, found it: http://www.fastcompany.com/user/om-malik.rss http://www.fastcompany.com/user/om-malik.rss
softdev12 12y ago
I read a bunch of different tech sites, but it my opinion, the most relevant stuff is on HN. It basically aggregates all the best stuff from all the tech publications anyway, so you are probably just as well off in the end. Of course, if you want to read more academic articles per se, stick to the big science publications like Nature, etc. Here's a list in no particular order: 1) recode 2) pando daily 3) techcrunch 4) techmeme (another good aggregator) 5) Mit tech review 6) New York Times Bits 7) WSJ D 8) CNET 9) Mashable

treelovinhippie 12y ago

After receiving $8m in funding 12 months ago: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...

BallinBige 12y ago
im sure it was traunched. god i hope so.. actually no i dont, dumb money
djloche 12y ago
They tried to pivot, raised a bunch of money, hired 70+ people, and likely burned through it all.
- chx 12y ago
  Any source on the 70+ people?
  - jeromegv 12y ago
    Here it is: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...

ripb 12y ago

Is it just me or does there seem to be significantly more of a recode.net presence on HN at the moment? I hadn't heard of the site until recently and now I've seen a few fairly low-brow articles from it on the front page here in the last 24 hours.

dang 12y ago
I looked at the data and am pretty sure it's just random fluctuation. If there's a higher-brow article on this story we'll happily change the url.
shortformblog 12y ago
Recode automatically has rep here because it's run by the main principals of the old WSJ site AllThingsD. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg earned their rep—ReCode is just keeping it alive.

crystaln 12y ago

Could this be a canary for the end of this investment cycle?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kra34 12y ago

How does a tech company run out of money? Isn't this where some VC steps in with a billion dollar valuation for the series G round?

doctorshady 12y ago
Don't be ridiculous, the written word is worthless. Nobody is going to visit a site that makes you read more then a paragraph.
pkaye 12y ago
I don't think they are a tech company.

walterbell 12y ago

Thanks to Mathew Ingram for his valiant articles and twitter commentary on journalism ethics. Maybe he will consider following the Ben Thompson / stratechery business model.

Scoundreller 12y ago
The Globe and Mail could use his abilities again too, I'm sure.

sremani 12y ago

I time to time read gigaom, the articles were mostly somber devoid of sensationalism, I will sorely miss gigaom.

jallmann 12y ago

Damn. I read Gigaom regularly, really appreciated the straight up news. It will be missed. Gigaom had an excellent writing staff, hope they get back on their feet quickly so we can keep reading their pieces.

shortformblog 12y ago

I'm pretty surprised by this, particularly in part because their events business seemed robust. My company sent me to an event of theirs in NYC two years ago, and it had a very high caliber of presenters/panelists (David Karp, Andrew Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, a few others). The tickets also weren't cheap. Sure, the company didn't go down the clickbait road, but it also had come up with revenue models that made up for that. Beyond events, they also had a research group—something that, to a degree, arguably made their real competition Gartner and Forrester. I wonder what role Om stepping away from the day-to-day played in this. What he said a year ago makes this turn of events seem shocking: https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its-time-for-the-next-chapter/ https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...

frabcus 12y ago
I went to, probably the same, (big data) Gigaom event. I really enjoyed it - good people and talks. There weren't, however, many customers there. It was all other people selling stuff. So I didn't go again. The recent wave of data related businesses are now generally at the phase where they need to meet potential customers from corporates at events. Not sure how/if this affects business model though! The profitability of events is opaque to me.

ilamont 12y ago

I thought they were on much more solid footing, considering the funding last year and the very strong talent in their ranks. For instance, Laura Hazard Owen is one of the best reporters covering the ebook industry. This could be a sign of things to come for other online pubs once the funding runs out. Too much competition, too little in the way of sustainable revenue sources, and not enough AOL acquisition cash to go around.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This is sad, and not entirely unexpected. Look for a large number of websites to go under just like Gigaom. Oddly enough, the reason these folks are failing is that Google's CPC (the money they get for an advertising "click") has gone down Year over Year for the last 13 quarters. What that means is that if your web site depended on advertising from Google (and most do), and your traffic remained constant, you have seen a 33% drop in gross revenue over that same period. Google doesn't call out their click fraud numbers, but they do improve their ability to detect it over time, which means your "quality" click through rate has been going down as well, for a double whammy. So unless you can improve volume, you die. In their Q4 report[1] they make this note: Network paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on non-Google properties participating in our AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, and AdMob businesses, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 7% over the third quarter of 2014. A third less advertising revenue on a 11% fewer clicks over all? Serious pain. As of the fourth quarter, Google also mentions it is paying nearly a billion dollars a quarter ($968M) to get search traffic. If you're a GigaOm and your traffic is already generating less revenue and fewer clicks are getting through, you can't really add insult to injury by paying people to send you traffic. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings....

petercooper 12y ago
I've seen YouTubers complaining about this too. One I follow (who has over 2m subscribers) says his views are up strongly in the past year (as in over 50% more) but his income has fallen by a third.
- neurotech1 12y ago
  On a popular space webcast, TMRO, the host mentioned their YouTube revenue was a "rounding error" compared to their revenue through Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/tmro https://www.patreon.com/tmro). They get $1000+ per episode.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  When did YouTube start using these really annoying video ads? Because it seem at that point that my non-technical aquentiences started to install adblockers. And it seems that youtube users use Patreon now.

andrewbinstock 12y ago

This is part of a trend that's just starting. I was the editor in chief at Dr. Dobb's, which many of you know closed down in December. As I explained in my farewell editorial [1], our ad sales were squeezed by a comparatively recent phenomenon in media, which is a very steep drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads--a lifeline for most web sites. The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively nobody ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad. For certain consumer sites, that's a survivable problem. For example, Budweiser's ads aren't intended to make a sale, but rather to remind people of the brand. However, for many tech companies (those that aren't tier 1), they don't have the funds to do brand-oriented ads. Their ads need to result in clicks and purchases. And that's just not happening on pure websites. (FB and Twitter are a wholly different category.) Personally, I expect that more web sites in the tech sector that have depended in the past on advertising will either fail or drastically cut back on their offerings. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421 http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421

vonnik 12y ago
Great comment. As part of the marketing team at a well funded but very money-conscious startup, I can confirm this awareness that most web ads have no visible effect on the bottom line, or the cost of customer acquisition is so high as to be prohibitive. On the web, people are overwhelmed with marketing messages. It's very hard to find the right demographic, and then to convince them to act. This has always been true, but it has become much more measurable since the Internet came along. Unless you are a large corporation with the belief that "branding" can be bought, and the budget to back it up, there's no reason to buy online ads in most venues.
- rsync 12y ago
  Can you (or andrewbinstock) comment with regard to google adwords ? I don't think of those as the same thing as banner ads ...
  - Scoundreller 12y ago
    As a (very) small-time publisher, but with a fairly reasonable sample over the years, CPM ads pay about 1/5th what CPC ads do. I think that shows how much "brand awareness" versus "I'm trying to make a sale" advertising is worth. Edit: CPM pays 1/3rd the rate, but CPC ads make up 90% of revenue, which makes sense if they generally pay more. I run a rather diverse set of sites, but I stay away from tech.

cookrn 12y ago

I think one of Om's earliest blogs (may have even been an acquisition) was about being a digital nomad. I was just getting in to tech/startup news at the time and for whatever reason, that one stuck out to me. (Can anyone find a link?) I've always enjoyed reading their content over the years and will be sad to see them go.

juanmnl 12y ago

First guess, they didn't take the native advertising wave, losing thousands per article to cough cough Techcrunch-likes cough cough

kevinastone 12y ago

“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway

ulfw 12y ago

Another one bites the dust. Pity.

ilamont 12y ago

From the GigaOm media kit (1) Display advertising: Charging $35-$45 CPMs, depending on the channel. Rates dependent on campaign duration, budget and targeting. 300x250, 300x600 and 970x250 ad units available. Flipboard campaign: $55 CPM, over 1.5 million readers/month "1-week channel takeover" - Gigaom homepage channel (1M+ impressions per week) $22K per week - includes two sponsored posts. Mobile channel $15k, cloud $8k. Sponsored posts: $3,000 250-word sponsored post $5,000 800-word sponsored post Event sponsorships: $5K–$85K Research: Annual cost appears to be $10k 1. https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-media-kit-v3.pdf https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-medi...

manigandham 12y ago

I've worked in the adtech industry for years and now run a new company focused on content/native ads. Online advertising is a vast and complicated ecosystem with hundreds of companies and lots of politics but all this is to say that sites like Gigaom failing are almost never just down to simple factors as "ads pay less". Some points on online advertising itself though, in random order: - Overall pageviews online are up, a lot. More people are online now and with more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, even tvs). - Ad blockers (depending on the site) can be anywhere from 10-50% of users. - Desktop is now the minority, usually about 35% of traffic. - Ad blockers are mostly on desktop, so while they are making an impact, it's somewhat minimized by the shift to mobile. - Ad blockers are also mostly run by corporations that make money and most allow companies to buy exceptions (Google does this, along with all those recommended links guys like Outbrain, Taboola and dozens of others. To be perfectly honest, we're trying to get on this list as well.) - There's a difference between branding/awareness campaigns (like for GE) vs performance campaigns (like for Newegg). Awareness is about getting you to recognize, remember, engage with and otherwise think about the brand. Especially important for B2B/enterprise and other companies that don't have things for consumers to buy, or even cheap enough for mainstream. Performance is all about getting a click, or these days even a signup, purchase or some other "action". - The ability of digital advertising to track things to such a granular level has made everything more efficient, driving down prices to a few cents per click in some cases. The ads you see on a webpage have gone through an entire auction process with dozens of bidders in about 100 milliseconds before you ever see anything. - Fraud is a huge issue along with viewability (whether an ad actually shows up inside the browser window vs. never being scrolled into view, inactive tab, etc). Early studies have pegged fraud/viewability problems at almost 50% although this is rapidly going down with new companies and standards. Nobody wants fraud and it's a constant arms race. - There are lots of ad types, everything from display (banners) to rich media (interstitials, popups, expanding/moving/interactive stuff), to native ads, to video, to email, and more. They all work on different parts of the "sales funnel" and there are different strategies in place. One of the biggest is called retargeting. It's when you visit a site then see ads for that same company across the web, even days or weeks later. It's all about making you remember and come back to learn more, buy something, etc. And it works really well. - Display ads do work. While everyone seems to think that they won't ever click on a banner, Google sees hundreds of millions of clicks a day. Those recommended widgets get tens of millions of clicks a day. Ads work, whether you want to believe it or not, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist. Those billboards on the side of a freeway are far more expensive than small campaigns online but they're still bought because you can measure the effect before and after and see a measurable increase in whatever you're interested in. - People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain about being tracked. Trust me, ad networks want to get you the best ads as possible. Showing you what you're interested helps everyone. But we can't know who you are, what you've seen or anything else if we can't track you in some way. And for those who are worried about privacy, for all the legit ad platforms, you're nothing more than a randomized id number. Not personal information. If you're worried about that, then stay off Facebook where most people willingly give all their info. - Most advertising is being shifted to be bought on audiences rather than sites. Native ads are shifting this back somewhat but most modern platforms work by selling audience segments primarily, so as an advertiser you would run a campaign targeting 18-25 males interested in sports for example. Doesn't matter what site, as long as the audience matches and this is facilitated by the efficiency of running the aforementioned auctions (called RTB for Real-Time Bidding). - While privacy is important, there's an arms race with tracking because advertisers want this audience access. The recent issue with cookies has only made tech companies even better at tracking and there are entire sub-industries dedicated to tracking people across all of their devices. We can do this today. And it will only get better. Again the intentions are to get you better ads but if you're worried about privacy, just be aware that it's not that easy to "hide". --- If you've read this far, I hope that helped give some insight into online ads. I'm sorry I can't give exact sources as this is data that comes our ad network and it's not published anywhere, but we do have global coverage and this is very accurate in the US/European region. Disclaimer again: I run https://instinctive.io https://instinctive.io but feel free to email/message if you want more info.

damonpace 12y ago

You can build a lean website on CPC advertising...but it's hard to build a real business based on that. Advertising should be viewed as supplemental revenue, rather than the main business model. I assume that's why GigaOm began to shift over to the subscription model. It could also be one of the reasons Google just came out with the "Contributors" beta last week. They may have realized the CPC ad model does not pay enough and content creators need better business models to make it worth their time.

feybay 12y ago

I wasn't a heavy reader of the site, but it always struck me as very fact-oriented and professional. That's too bad to hear.

halayli 12y ago

maybe it's time for paid subscription model?

dredmorbius 12y ago
I'm leaning to something closer to a patron / member model, though with most content generally available. We're seeing a reprise of earlier forms of media. Truth is: there is a social (and business) need for quality and reasonably unbiased information. There's also value to those who want to control such a feed (the dark side of media). Advertising has sustained the concept in some form or another for several hundred years, with a few big shake-ups. But there've also be (and continue to be) highly ideological organizations (see Fox News / NewsCorp / WSJ, well know, but also The Economist, and on the left, papers such as The Guardian, Mother Jones, or The Christian Science Monitor). The problem, in an online era, of subscriptions only is that it closes your distribution down too much. Providing early access might be a way around that, though information tends to get out very, very quickly. Of numerous bad options, it strikes me as one of the less-bad (see LWN.net which uses it). Another is partnering with someone who has a clear interest in your demographic -- DICE buying Slashdot, for example, though that doesn't seem to be going all too well from either a content or business stand point so far as I can tell. Hacker News follows the same model, more successfully (on both grounds) via Ycombinator. Advertising, though, seems to me a dead end. And it's going to be all kinds of hurt for the current iteration of Silicon Valley if it plays out as I suspect it will.

buyx 12y ago

With "dead tree" publications dying, and online ad supported publishing not being lucrative, how will the demand for content be satisfied? Here in South Africa, our newspapers and magazines are in steep decline (but still profitable), and it seems everyone under 35 gets their news from ad-supported websites that are probably losing money. Perhaps Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos were ahead of the curve. People may yet turn back to more traditional news sources, even if they are delivered via more modern mediums, such as tablets, if web advertising supported sites die.

shubhamjain 12y ago

> Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a story book ending. Quite daunting. Everyone hears the success stories and dreams of doing the same, or maybe even better but most fail. The reason I believe people push themselves to entrepreneurship is they ask themselves - "Why can't we? We are as smart as them and we have all the knowledge before us". Failure sucks and not everyone is capable of handling it in a positive way - "So what, I'll do better next time. I won't quit.". Perhaps, what scares me the most from my own 'business adventure'.

mercurial 12y ago

One idea for a business would be being a subscription service. Partner with some big names, which already offer/consider offering subscriptions. Users select a monthly payment, and tick boxes for the websites they want to support. Much less hassle than subscribing to each and every website which wants/needs your money. Maybe with an RSS feed aggregating content from your selection.

Angostura 12y ago

Another triumph for Adblock

dredmorbius 12y ago
Adblock is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Advertising itself is hostile to quality content and good practices.

pknerd 12y ago

Many people discussed that it happened due to Adblocker. If that's true then how sites like Mashable and Techcrunch still surviving?

strictnein 12y ago
Mashable isn't a tech site any more, really, so their target market doesn't use Adblock as much. It's a bad HuffPo / BuzzFeed clone. Started when they took funding two years ago and has gone way downhill ever since.

muyuu 12y ago

70 people full time? that sounds like an awful lot. If these are SanFran salaries then their running costs are already immense without even considering other running costs. Cannot a site like this be ran by 10-15 people? Maybe I'm missing where the labour is going.

mkr-hn 12y ago
They probably needed a few people for events.

bonn1 12y ago

With 'more than 6.5 million monthly' they should do between 50K - 200K/m depending on the bizdev and sales skills. 50K is not enough to keep operations running, 100K would work with editors from low-wage countries. But still a bit odd that they ran out of money.

gitdude 12y ago

The long-term solution is to form a consortium of online media and charge a monthly subscription fee of $9.99/month or so. (Tech media comes together: techcrunch, venturebeat, recode, etc.) Having individual paywalls will not incentivize readers to pay an annual subscription fee. And then the revenue can be split between various media outlets.

gesman 12y ago

I had pretty good click-to-buy success but only at a narrow subject, dedicate vertical sites. In other words selling backup software to the readers of data backup tech site. GigaOM is a wide subject site and only brand awareness ads would make sense. For click-my-ad-to-buy-my-stuff hopeful advertiser - it's a waste of money.

damm 12y ago

Unfortunately their paid-wall model of content really didn't work. When Gigom went into the multi-site model the fragmentation (and the quality) went down hill They tried to resurrect it but the damage was done