Pixable

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

~ the obit ~

Pixable started in 2009 as a problem nobody had named yet. Facebook had become the place where all your photographs lived, and there were far too many of them to look at. Inaki Berenguer and Andres Blank, who had met Alberto Sheinfeld at MIT, built something that pulled in the photo streams from your accounts and ranked them by who you actually talked to, so the pictures from close friends surfaced and the eight hundred from a stranger's wedding did not.

The pitch inside the company was that it was an inbox for photographs. Photofeed arrived in January 2011 and picked up a hundred thousand users in ten days. Menlo Ventures and Highland Capital put in around six million dollars. By the time Singapore Telecommunications bought the company in September 2012 for 26.5 million dollars it had roughly twelve million users and a working answer to a question that Facebook itself would spend years fumbling.

Then Facebook and Google both shipped their own version of the answer, for free, inside the apps where the photos already were. An aggregator with no photos of its own has a short half-life once the sources decide to aggregate themselves. Pixable was a Singtel subsidiary by then, with a parent that wanted a consumer digital business in the American market, and the answer it reached for was to stop being a photo app entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ from photos to listicles ~

The second Pixable was a content site aimed at 18 to 34 year olds, built on the traffic mechanics that were making BuzzFeed enormous. It hired editorial staff and ran sponsored posts for brands like Walmart and Disney, chasing the same feed everyone else in the category was chasing. It was not a bad version of that business. It was simply the fortieth entrant into it, funded by a Singaporean telecom with no particular reason to keep funding it.

~ what the numbers hid ~

October 2015 was the best month Pixable ever had: 9.4 million unique visitors. It was also the month that made the case for closing. Average time on the site was one minute and twenty-five seconds, which is the signature of traffic arriving from a social feed, reading one thing and leaving. That is a real audience by the counter on the wall and a thin one by any measure an advertiser cares about in the long run.

Singtel had spent 2015 trying to spin the business out or find it a new owner, and said plainly afterward that the process had not been successful and that it had decided to exit. For a product that reached nine million people a month in a country where I have never lived, the interesting part is how completely the peak and the funeral overlapped.

~ closing up shop ~

The site served its last normal day on 30 November 2015 and the announcement followed on 1 December. Chris C. Anderson, the VP of editorial, posted the farewell under the title "Pixable Closing Up Shop After One Crazy, Awesome Ride" and was careful to say the closure had nothing to do with how the site was performing. Staff were offered other roles inside the Singtel group.

What replaced the homepage for the next few months was a 681-byte page with a Google Analytics tag and a two-second JavaScript timer that bounced you to that Medium post. Somebody wired a redirect from a dead company to its own obituary and then left. The domain does not resolve at all today, which is a rarer ending than the parked lander: nobody wanted the name enough to squat on it.

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