Post News, a microblogging service that launched in the days after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, is closing down after just a year and a half in beta.
Founder Noam Bardin, who was formerly CEO of Waze, announced the announcement 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 significant platform,” said Bardin. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption, and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”
Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and digital analyst, funded Post, although the platform never published the amount raised. Kara Swisher, a Silicon Valley writer, advised the startup.
Post’s plan was to capitalize on Twitter’s image as a virtual watercooler for journalists and then expand on it by developing a new mechanism for publishers and authors to monetize. Rather than subscribing to many newspapers, Post customers might buy particular articles from certain partner sites.
Despite Post’s collapse, Bardin believes the firm demonstrated something about the many ways in which digital news providers might profit. He noted that the study “validated many theories around micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles.” The site also enabled users to reward authors for their efforts.
Bardin is correct that the media landscape is shifting. There are more independent and worker-owned journals than ever before, housed on technology platforms such as Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost. However, it is possible that attempting to capture this embryonic movement on a social network was premature.
Around the same time that Post emerged, a number of other Twitter alternatives competed for the attention of users who were dissatisfied with Musk’s ownership choices. Post survived for more than a year after its start, but it is not the only new microblogging service that has failed. In October, Pebble, previously known as T2, closed down.
As we all know, social media is a difficult industry, and just because visitors come to your site for a brief while does not imply they will remain around.
