Media Startup Failures

The internet video pioneer that built 20 years of fandom and was shut down by Warner Bros in 5 minutes

a16z-backed, celebrity-endorsed, Lucy Guo-led. Still couldn't find product-market fit in creator tools.

Tried to bring Chinese live commerce to sneakerheads. American screens didn't convert.

The 'YouTube for podcasts' became just another Spotify tab.

The music recommendation pioneer with 10M scrobbling users was acquired by CBS for $280M — then CBS never invested, Spotify built the same recommendations, and CBS sold it for a fraction of the price

Panama streaming startup with 28,000 subscribers dismantled by Netflix and HBO's simultaneous price wars.

The streetwear media brand sold for $300M in 2021 and resold at a massive loss two years later

$5.7B digital media empire that burned $1.4B in investor capital

The digital business news pioneer sold for $75M in 2018 and shut down for free in 2023

Creator economy platform hit $4B valuation — then laid off twice, cut valuation by half, and watched Substack steal the newsletter writers

Japan's first streaming pioneer survived 18 years before Netflix and corporate restructuring killed it.

Built the best podcast search. Then Spotify built it too, for free.

A niche streaming bundle for geeks, dissolved by a corporate merger that had nothing to do with its performance.

Steve Bartlett's social media empire listed at £200M, then collapsed after he left for Dragons' Den

Digital media's biggest SPAC at $1.5B. BuzzFeed News shut 18 months later. Stock down 95%.

SoftBank's bet on creator IP arbitrage imploded when ad CPMs crashed 40%.

Raised $262M trying to out-Twitch Twitch. Viewers never came.

The live streaming platform that couldn't brew an audience

A newsletter monetization layer that got crushed between Substack and Ghost.

Social radio with real music licenses. The licenses cost more than the listeners paid.

France's second-largest telecom. Altice leveraged buyout. Debt crisis.

Chilean digital media startup. Advertising model broke. Subscriptions too slow.

Millions of Russian stock photos, one sanctions notice, zero future contributors.

The $250M travel media startup that laid off 90% of staff and pivoted out of media in one brutal week

France's music streaming pioneer. SPAC peak. 90% value destruction.

Twitter's answer to Substack lasted exactly two years before Musk pulled the plug.

Israel's original internet portal. Digital advertising collapse. Sold for almost nothing.

Premium podcast subscription raised $100M to offer exclusive shows for $7.99/month. Spotify and Apple owned the creators. Sold to Pandora for pennies.

The creator economy had room for giants. Mid-sized tools got quietly crushed.

Facebook's Substack killer died in 18 months without killing anything

A newsletter platform that raised $2.8M and shut down before reaching 1,000 active users.

India's premium digital storytelling bet that pivoted into irrelevance.

The BBC-backed podcast player that made listening visual — and made production too complex.

China's $100M podcast conquest of America that forgot Americans don't work like Chinese users.

Russia's esports empire crumbled when geopolitics made it radioactive to the global industry.

Mexico's Spanish-language audiobook startup couldn't survive when Spotify, Amazon Audible, and Apple entered LatAm

The podcast audiogram tool killed by VC-funded free competitors in a race to zero.

China's beloved indie music radio lasted 14 years before licensing fees made survival impossible.

Spotify's $72M bet on live audio that even 400 million users couldn't save.

Digital media startup fabricated metrics — CEO impersonated YouTube's CEO

90 million readers, a $600M exit — and the Canadian dream quietly absorbed into Seoul.

China's original short-video king had 300M users — then Douyin arrived and erased it.

Ad-free news for everyone — until Twitter bought it and killed it.

Twitter paid $86M for live video in 2015 — then deleted 6 years of broadcasts to save server costs

Mexican streaming infrastructure. AWS CloudFront arrived.

The Chinese streaming giant that became an EV and smartphone conglomerate, collapsed under $6B of debt, and whose founder fled to the US.

Brazilian sports streaming startup. COVID cancelled every game. Shut down.

The women's spoken word app that couldn't outbid Audible for content or customers.

Live trivia app peaked at 2.4M players, collapsed after CEO died

The local TV station digital platform that raised 115M dollars and could not survive as broadcast advertising collapsed.

Microsoft paid Ninja $30M to kill Twitch — and Twitch won anyway

$1.75B for 10-minute videos. Nobody asked. During a pandemic.

Africa's event-tech darling had no backup plan when concerts vanished.

The $1.75B short-form streaming bet that discovered nobody wanted premium video in 7-minute chapters.

Weibo's own livestreaming app failed to survive TikTok Live — then got absorbed by its parent.

Univision's $135M digital media empire sold for $1.1M in under three years.

Wang Sicong burned $180M of Wanda family money trying to beat Huya and Douyu at livestreaming.

Unlimited movies for $9.99/month. Math said no.

Accidentally deleted 12 years of music history during a server migration.

Human-curated playlists. Killed by algorithms and music licensing fees.

The premium sports streaming service launched in the UK for £4.99/month and collapsed within one year

Broadcast Roland Garros in VR. Barely anyone was watching.

2 million loyal readers couldn't save a women's media brand that never cracked revenue.

GDPR wiped out a Greek adtech startup's entire business model in six months.

Gaming YouTube MCN with 12B monthly views and 180M subscribers was acquired by AT&T/Otter Media. Shut January 2019. All 40,000+ YouTube channels and years of content deleted overnight.

Disney paid $500M for YouTube creators and destroyed what made them valuable.

A mobile app delivering bite-sized tech news and stories in a tappable, story-based format similar to Instagram and Snapchat.

Millions of brides were inspired; none of them paid enough for Lover.ly to survive.

Lena Dunham's feminist media brand that 500K subscribers couldn't save.

France's YouTube. YouTube arrived. Vivendi owns the ruins.

Digital media company with 1 billion monthly views shut without warning on a Friday. 300 employees found out Monday morning. YouTube had changed its algorithm.

Lachlan Murdoch-backed ad startup sued Google for USD 300M and ran out of money mid-lawsuit.

The millennial news brand that went all-in on Facebook video — the day before Facebook changed the algorithm

Verizon spent $1.2 billion building a streaming service 2.5 million people used.

Turned down $44.6B from Microsoft. Sold for $4.5B nine years later.

Europe's Netflix before Netflix arrived — then Netflix arrived.

Pete Cashmore built the internet's biggest tech blog from his bedroom in Scotland — then turned down $950M and sold for $50M

Invented the short video format — then watched TikTok harvest the category it created.

One music service, four names, eleven years, and zero market share vs. Spotify and Apple Music.

The luxury island music festival that was FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches

Ex-Hulu CEO raised $100M to build premium YouTube. Charged $3/month for early access to YouTube videos. YouTube made the creators say no. Sold for pennies.

Nick Denton's gossip empire published a celebrity sex tape. Peter Thiel secretly funded the lawsuit. $140M judgment filed Chapter 11. Univision bought the network for $135M. Gawker.com went dark.

New York's most powerful gossip blog was sued by Hulk Hogan with Peter Thiel's secret funding — $140M jury verdict forced bankruptcy, and the legal strategy was later revealed as revenge for Gawker outing Thiel as gay in 2007

Music streaming and sharing platform where bands and fans could connect and discover music together.

The tool that made the web readable but couldn't make reading pay.

14 months of hype, then Facebook Live turned off the lights.

The UK music streaming service that survived six years and was bought just to be shut down

The atomic news app that broke stories into digestible facts — shut down when social media made that a feature, not a business

35 million users, zero licenses — the music streaming platform that bet it could outrun the labels

Google bought the best music curation on the internet, then quietly deleted it.

The music streaming service that built the best product, lost to Spotify anyway, and went bankrupt in 2015

The music streaming app that was better than Spotify but still lost

Peter Gabriel's music startup was acquired by Tesco — and that's where both ideas went to die

A B2B live news video tool that couldn't survive when free consumer apps offered the same thing.

Shoppable photos before Pinterest Shopping — the right idea with no platform to live on

Last.fm invented algorithmic music discovery in 2002. CBS Interactive bought it for $280M and slowly killed it.

Europe's music video platform raised €10 million before YouTube and Vevo made it redundant

Announced free legal music at Sundance 2008 with deals that didn't exist

Justin.tv was a live streaming platform that allowed regular people to broadcast video content, initially popular for sports and gaming streams before evolving into the gaming-focused Twitch platform.

Readmill built the most beautiful e-reader app with social highlighting. Dropbox acquired it in March. Shut it down in July.

Supreme Court killed the antenna startup the broadcast networks feared

Google paid $39M for AI music curation based on activity and mood — then shut Songza 6 months after acquisition and integrated the technology into Google Play Music

Google killed its most beloved product to prop up Google+. One product died. Both were gone within 2 years.

iVillage had 15M women readers. NBC bought it for $600M. They turned it into a Today.com redirect.

4 million sticker collectors who never turned into a monetizable TV ad business.

Brilliant audio fingerprinting tech, acquired by Yahoo in 4 months, killed in 2 years.

Check-in for TV shows sounded clever until nobody cared what their friends were watching.

It really whipped the llama's ass — then AOL whipped Winamp's.

Invented internet streaming in 1995 — then made the product so annoying that users welcomed its replacement.

Murdoch spent $50M building a newspaper for a tablet audience that didn't exist yet.

The music streaming service with the best recommendation engine — acquired into extinction

A search engine and publisher advertising platform focused on indexing blogs and assigning authority scores.

Brought your music to the cloud before iCloud existed — then Samsung buried it.

Thoora was a news aggregation platform.

Netflix announced Qwikster on September 18, 2011. Cancelled it on October 10, 2011. 22 days. One of the fastest corporate reversals ever.

Built the most beautiful digital book ever made — Facebook bought it and cancelled publishing.

A music streaming service that would be bundled into hardware devices, offering unlimited streaming and downloading for the lifetime of the device.

GoTo.com invented paid search. Yahoo paid $1.63B for it. Google used the same idea to build a $100B business.

Apple paid $80M to kill the future of streaming — then rebuilt it as iTunes Match.

9,000 stores. Turned down Netflix for $50M. Filed for bankruptcy.

The music social network with 23M users that let you stream any song for free — destroyed by record label licensing terms that charged $0.25 per stream before Spotify existed

The internet TV startup founded by the creators of Skype — $45M from CBS, Viacom, and Warner, then shut down a year after launch when YouTube went HD

The P2P network that survived Grokster's legal defeat and died anyway

Sony's iTunes competitor — built to protect the record labels, not to serve the listener.

Sony and Universal built a legal Napster. It had 20,000 songs and DRM so restrictive users couldn't even burn a CD.

The first major Latin American internet portal. $4.7 billion market cap. Stock fell to $0.14.

Invented pay-per-click search — then watched Google perfect it

Built the internet's music library before iTunes. The major labels sued it into a $370M acquisition and shutdown.

Mark Cuban's internet radio company — sold to Yahoo for $5.7B in 1999 stock, shut down 3 years later, and became Mark Cuban's ticket to buy the Dallas Mavericks

Bernie Ebbers hid $3.8B in fraud and created the biggest bankruptcy in US history.

The world's largest internet radio sold to Yahoo for $5.7B in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com bubble — Yahoo discontinued the service in 2002, but Mark Cuban had already sold all his Yahoo stock before the crash

A legacy broadcaster bet $2.7 billion on the internet and lost it in 14 months

The internet portal + broadband ISP that tried to be the AOL killer. It killed itself instead.

Disney spent $790M trying to be Yahoo. It took them 2 years and a $790M write-down to find out they weren't.

The Usenet archive that pivoted to product reviews and comparison shopping — raised $100M+ before being acquired by Google for effectively nothing

The dot-com that paid 13 million users to watch ads while they browsed — spent $160M on user payments but could never charge advertisers enough to break even

The peer-to-peer music platform that hit 80 million users in 2 years — and was destroyed by the music industry before it could become Spotify

Sri Lanka's digital media pioneer became a zombie after ad revenues collapsed

Israeli interactive video startup that raised $170M trying to make branching narratives mainstream.

Multistream platform that raised $50M and was commoditized by Twitch, YouTube, and LinkedIn building native multistream.

Zimbabwean digital media platform collapsed as advertising market evaporated in economic crisis

French TV aggregation app that raised 80 million euros to become the Netflix of live television but was sold to fuboTV at a markdown.

Venezuelan independent streaming news platform forced offline by the Maduro government

The Arab world Spotify raised $73M, listed on NASDAQ, and was acquired at near-zero value in 2024 after Spotify and Apple Music entered the region and made its regional-language moat irrelevant.

Premium SMS and mobile content subscription services across Asia-Pacific

Pioneer tech media raised $35M and expanded to conferences and research reports — then Google and Facebook took 90% of digital advertising, eliminating the revenue model

Venezuelan digital media startup devoured by hyperinflation and internet throttling

Southeast Asian Netflix challenger raised $152M to bring affordable streaming to 25 countries and sold its content library to Tencent for a fraction of invested capital.

The mobile news app that built a better journalism format and discovered that better formats don't pay journalists

Rupert Murdoch's $30M iPad news app that 100,000 people subscribed to for 6 months

Podcast studio that pioneered narrative audio then got swallowed by Spotify strategy shifts.

Barcelona mobile publisher monetization platform serving 1,500+ media companies, absorbed by Equativ ad-tech.

London AI photo book app that raised 10M pounds and competed against Photobox and Snapfish before shutting down as the photo printing market contracted.

Colombian digital news platform drained by Google and Facebook advertising duopoly

Israeli AI video creation startup raised $30M and was outcompeted by Canva and TikTok built-in tools

Chinese knowledge podcast empire that raised $80M at $700M valuation and was shut down by content regulators.

Music licensing marketplace connecting artists and rights holders with brands, films, and content creators seeking licensed music for their projects

Brazil's leading music streaming app was acquired by Deezer for $7M then quietly shut down as Spotify took the market.

A Dutch pay-per-article journalism startup backed by The New York Times that spent 10 years proving readers do not pay for individual articles.

UK kids-safe digital advertising platform acquired by Epic Games and shuttered as a standalone business.

Barcelona video streaming pioneer acquired by Rakuten, rebranded into oblivion as Rakuten TV, losing its identity.

France's answer to LinkedIn with 65M users that filed for insolvency in 2016 as LinkedIn made it obsolete.

Josh Harris built the first internet streaming network seven years before YouTube — then the bandwidth to watch it did not exist and the money ran out

Debate and polling media platform backed by Gannett that could not monetize Gen Z engagement.