Post News, a microblogging site that appeared a few days after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, is closing its doors barely a year and a half after its beta launch.
Founder Noam Bardin, former CEO of Waze, announced the news in a post on Friday.
“Ultimately, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a meaningful platform,” Bardin said. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to demonstrate rapid consumer adoption and we failed to find the right mix of products to achieve that.”
Post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NYU professor and tech commentator Scott Galloway, but the platform never revealed how much it raised. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an advisor to the company.
Post’s strategy was to exploit Twitter’s reputation as a virtual water cooler for journalists, then build further on that reputation by creating a new way for publishers and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.
Despite Post’s closure, Bardin said he believes the company has proven something about the different ways digital media can monetize. He wrote that Post “validated many theories around micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual items.” The platform also allowed users to tip writers for their work.
Bardin is right: the media landscape is changing. There are more independent and worker-owned publications than ever before, hosted on tech platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost. But perhaps it was too early to try to capture this burgeoning movement in a social platform.
Around the same time Post appeared, a number of other Twitter alternatives jumped into the ring to capture the population of users who would be dissatisfied with Musk’s ownership decisions. Post managed to hold on for over a year after its launch, but it’s not the only new microblogging site to be shut down. Pebble, also known as T2, closed in October.
As we knew all along, social media is a tough business – and even if users flock to your site for a fleeting moment, that doesn’t mean they’ll stick around.
techcrunch
