Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk's acquisition of twitter, is closing just a year and a half after launching in beta.
Founder Noam Bardin, former CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.
“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a major platform,” Bardin explained. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we haven't been able to find the right product mix to make that happen.”
The post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Scott Galloway, a professor and technology commentator at New York University, but the platform never revealed how much it raised. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an advisor to the company.
The Post's strategy was to take advantage of twitter's reputation as a virtual water cooler for journalists, and then leverage it further by creating a new way for editors and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to several different publications, Post users could purchase individual items at certain partner outlets.
Despite Post's closure, Bardin believes the company demonstrated something about the different ways digital media can monetize. He wrote that Post “validated many theories about micropayments and consumers' willingness to purchase individual items.” The platform also allowed users to tip writers for their work.
Bardin is right that the media landscape is changing. There are more independent and worker-owned publications than ever, hosted on tech platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost. But perhaps it was too early to try to capture this nascent movement on a social platform.
Around the same time Post emerged, several 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 stay there for about a year and a half after launching, but it's not the only new microblogging site to shut down. Pebble, also known as T2, closed in October.
As we always knew, social media is a tough business, and even if users flock to your site for a fleeting moment, that doesn't mean they'll stay.
