This day started with some sad news:
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. All operations have ceased.
Gigaom is (was?) a very nice technology site. I liked it. And I'll certainly be sad to see it go. However, this failure proves something I've said for years, yet everyone else seemed to disagree:
If your web-based business depends on ad revenue, you're going to fail.
Sure, some stay at home moms can get few hundreds of bucks per month by blogging about the color of their baby poop. And some other stay at home moms will read this shit blog, looks at the ads, and possibly even click on Pimpers(tm) picture to buy some. Yes, that can work.
But you can't build a real business based on ad revenue.
Nobody loves ads
Face it - people hate ads. That's why people install adblockers. It's not because they hate you, the poor publisher. It's not because adblocker speeds up web page loading time. And it's certainly not because people need to save some traffic.
You can remind them nicely:
You can nag and deny access to your precious content, like ArsTechnica did in 2010, or lots of sites try to do today:
But no matter how hard you try, you can't make a long-term business based on ads.
R.I.P. GigaOm, I hope others will learn from your failure.
The tech bubble is starting to burst!
Gigaom is back. It has been acquired by a third party.
Oh, really? From what I can see, someone bought their domain name and the old content. Could not find a single new article on their webpage.