JuicyCampus,a site that was all about juicy gossips and used to encourage students for posting juicy(sort of cyber-bullying) messages about their peers has officially announced its termination of services.JuicyCampus Founder Matt Ivester wrote a blog post on the company’s blog,announcing website’s shutdown and pointing out the reasons for such a traumatic end to their ill-famed service.
Ivester pointed out ‘poor revenues’ being the major reason behind shutdown,despite steady usage and growth of the site among campuses.
Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can’t survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result,we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009.
Economic pressure is understandable but shutting down a website that’s showing steady growth and user loyalty isn’t a great idea at all.According to Compete analytics tool,JuicyCampus was definitely undergoing certain growth for the past few months but considering past one year,it had undergone sort of a sinusoidal growth chart.
More plausible reasons can be ‘mismanaged exhaustion of monetory reserves’ and the other one can be ‘legal elegations’.
As JuicyCampus was more like an ‘open scrapbook for writing down one’s frustration for his/her peers with worst possible abusive language’,service remained a bit controversial since its inception specially for the colleges(many colleges simply banned this site).
Anyways,the service is no more existant now and a lesson that one can take out of this deadpooled startup is that ‘Better avoid controversial areas that violate basic moral ethics while venturing out a business‘.