A pioneer tech journalism site, Gigaom shuts down on Monday evening as it was running out of money.
Gigaom, a site which provided latest information related to technology was founded by Om Malik in the year 2006. However, Monday evening around 5.57 PM the site was shut down by the management after posting a message which read : “Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. All operations have ceased. We do not know at this time what the lenders intend to do with the assets or if there will be any future operations using those assets. The company does not currently intend to file bankruptcy. We would like to take a moment and thank our readers and our community for supporting us all along.” Twitter was flooded with lots of reactions from Gigaom’s employees once this message was posted by Gigaom’s management.
A statement made by Mallik on his personal blog post clearly indicated that there are no chances of the site being revived. The blog read :”Gigaom is winding down and its assets are now controlled by the company’s lenders. It is not how you want the story of a company you founded to end.” Gigaom had many great journalists and in addition it also had its event business and research team. The company relied on venture capital firms for its funding. Om Malik had left Gigaom a year ago to join True Venture as a partner; True Venture is a venture capital firm. Malik had noted that Gigaom has raised more than $8 million in new funding.
Malik wrote in a post on February 20th 2014, the time when he left Gigaom saying “In 2008, our company decided that we would not pray at the altar of page views and advertising metrics that do nothing but devalue our readers’ time and attention,” he also added “The company, however, has evolved well beyond a mere blog to what it is today — a group of more than 70 really smart people — thanks to the efforts of Paul Walborsky, who has been our chief executive since 2008. Together with other members of our management team, we have built a company that embodies and echoes our core founding values.” Malik had then ended his post stating : “Writing, to me, is the meaning of life. My life became something special because of writing.”
Monday evening the site published a lot of news related to Apple’s event and much more new contents. However, eventually it has been closed which is truly a sad day for the tech media.
