Artifact's founders announced yesterday they are shutting the service down. And with that, yet another proof point that consumer content aggregation is not a venture scale business.
Whether you are trying to aggregate news content, concert listings or third-party recipes, you're probably not going to get enough users to reach that $100M revenue milestone. That's about a billion page views per month.
That's not to say there's no business at all. Gabe Rivera has been running Techmeme for nearly 20 years. Employs several people. Profitable. Not venture scale. Also, no investors, so I doubt he cares.
If you want to throw your hat in the ring, go for it. Build something freaking amazing. Just remember -- Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built Instagram, so they know a thing or two about consumer behavior. And what they learned was that an aggregator will bring in a small group of very passionate users and pretty much get ignored by the mass market. Not venture scale.
Ask Nuzzle. Ask Upcoming. Ask BuzzSite (my own aggregator disaster in 1999).
Original content wins. Pooling other people's content is a bootstrapped business, at best.
#startups #aggregation #justsayno