GigaOM

» see gigaom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

gigaom was part of my tech-blog reading rotation in the late 2000s. i was a computer engineer in ankara reading english-language tech press over ttnet, and gigaom sat alongside techcrunch and ars technica as the place to find long-form analysis instead of news-cycle stenography. om malik wrote like a person who had been a working journalist before, because he had been one. that voice carried the publication.

om malik registered gigaom.com in 2001 as a personal blog while he was a writer at red herring and then business week. he left to run it full time in june 2006 and the site grew into a tech-publication brand with paid analyst reports and conferences, plus a newsroom that by 2015 had 6.4 million monthly readers. the model was supposed to be premium research subsidizing free editorial. that was a fashionable structure in the early 2010s and it kept gigaom alive longer than most of its competitors.

what killed it was not a slow decline. on march 9 2015 om malik posted a short note saying gigaom had become unable to pay its creditors and the company was shutting down immediately. there was no severance round. there was no sale-process announcement before the lights went off. the entire newsroom found out the same day the readers did.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the gigaom of 2008 to 2013 was the long-form analysis tier of the tech blogosphere. paidcontent came in via acquisition in february 2012, which gave the site a media-industry vertical to set next to the mobile and cloud verticals. jkonthrun had folded in back in 2008 as the mobile-coverage anchor. the structure imitated forrester and gartner but with bloggers instead of analysts.

the events business kept the lights on. the structure conference and mobilize conference both ran annually and pulled in enterprise sponsors. for a window of about five years gigaom looked like the most sustainable mid-sized tech publication anyone had built. nobody else had cleanly combined a free editorial site with a paid research subscription that enterprise buyers actually paid for.

~ the unraveling ~

the premium-research model needed enterprise customers willing to pay annual fees that funded the free side. by 2014 those customers were drifting to either bigger analyst houses or to no-cost newsletters and analyst threads that did not exist a few years earlier. gigaom had raised about 22 million dollars in venture and it kept burning through that without finding the second growth curve. the conferences were profitable. the editorial was not.

~ how it actually ended ~

the march 9 2015 closure was driven by a senior lender that called its debt. om malik wrote later that the timing was sudden enough that staff did not get to write goodbye posts before they were locked out of the cms. the archive went into limbo for a few months. knowingly corporation bought the brand in june 2015 and relaunched it in august of that year as a research-only company.

the editorial-with-bylines version of gigaom did not come back. om malik moved to true ventures full time as an investor and stopped publishing under the gigaom masthead. the brand still exists at gigaom.com as an analyst-research site, but the daily-reads version that had 6.4 million monthly visitors in 2015 is a closed archive now.

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