Gigaom: Om Malik Announces His Noted Tech Blog Will Shut Down

Pioneering tech blog GigaOm is shutting down after failing to meet its obligations to creditors, founder Om Malik said Monday. The site raised over $8 million in seed funding last February, but struggled to make enough to keep the lights on with 8.3 million estimated pageviews per month.

Gigaom was one of the first notable tech blogs, launching in 2006, and was once described as a "sassy tech blog with class and standards and ethics and a big, big voice." The site hosts a number of events and has recently shifted away from Web publishing to its more lucrative research business, Re/code reports, but it appears it hasn't been able to make research or its events lucrative enough to continue operations.

Staffers said on Twitter that they await to find out about the status of Gigaom’s upcoming Structure Data event, which was scheduled for March 18-19 in New York City. The site employed over 70 staffers.

“Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time,” a notice posted by the site’s management said, noting that Gigaom does not plan on filing for bankruptcy. “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....We would like to take a moment and thank our readers and our community for supporting us all along.”

Founder Om Malik took a brief break from the site after suffering a heart attack in 2007, and left Gigaom for good last February to become a partner at venture capitalist firm True Ventures. He posted a statement on his official site regarding the shutdown of Gigaom, the full text of which is below.

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.

Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a story book ending.

There will be time for postmortems, but not today. Today, I want to thank all the people who make (and have helped make) Gigaom. Their role in this journey was what really made it all worth it. They are great people and they will all do great work wherever they go. I want to thank our investors who believed in the business long before it became fashionable. And most importantly, I want to thank you dear readers for coming along on this trip of a lifetime.

I might have left Gigaom, the company, over a year ago, but Gigaom, the idea still lives in my heart.

Goodnight sweetheart, I still love you!