great news juicy campus out of business
From Matt Ivester of now failed startup, Juicy Campus
Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can’t survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009.
From the author of the TechCrunch article
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the site’s advertising issues stemmed from the fact that it often featured incredibly hateful and mean-spirited content that advertisers were hesitant to be associated with. Ivester has long maintained that the site was for ‘Juicy’ gossip, not mean insults, but with top threads including “Biggest Whore At Tulane”, it was hardly a place for light-hearted fun. In light of the overwhelmingly negative comments found on the site, some schools began banning JuicyCampus entirely, leading Ivester to claim that they were “joining the ranks of the Chinese government in internet censorship, and spitting in the faces of everyone who believes in free discourse online”.
I suspect that the second one is the closest to the truth. Juicy Campus was a festering sore on the internet and a poke in the eye to everyone that uses the web for business or entertainment and goes out of their way to avoid causing distress.
Reading through the comments attached to this article I get the impression that this nasty little start up will not be missed.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Juicy Campus, startup, web
Another poster update
Today is web site day, I’ve already purchased the domain stevejohnsonposters.com and placed a holding page. today I will start to build the site. I am not going to sell the posters online yet.
This may happen further down the line when the design inventory and sales volume has grown a lot.
The site will have three several purposes, to advertise to potential retailers, list retailers currently carrrying stock and to offer custom designs at budget rates. I am trying to work up a model where the design is relatively cheap but the minimum order is quite high e.g. around 200.
The site will also brand the operation. I am not setting this up under the g2/go2graphics umbrella because I feel that the branding needs to be very different and unique.
Hopefully I will have a follow up post to this in a day or two with a link to the new web site.