From their website: The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com.
This has been a strange year.
Probably couldn’t make money and the VC funds dried up….
All the VC money is being dumped into AI right now.
Tech companies of yesteryear are starting to have to prove themselves in order to get funding, instead of relying on the wishy washy promises of old.
We can already see with Lemmy, that this phenomenon is giving breathing room to FOSS services.
I think it’s awesome, even if we’ll have to deal with growing pains for a while.
What even was their business plan? I never understood how’d they make money. I guess advertising is always the answer but how…
That’s why this year everything is going down. VCs demand you start making some money or shut down and nobody bothered figuring out how to make money
I am not a finance guy; this is my kindergarten-level understanding of the situation:
When the interest rates were hovering down around 0%, it was a no-brainer for VC firms to shotgun money out to everyone who walked past their office building. Most VC money doesn’t come from some rich dude’s pocket; it comes from banks and hedge funds and other deeply-market-tied entities. If any one startup they’ve invested in can win the profit lottery, the VCers will massively beat the rate of return they’d get for anything else. One big success can cover a dozen small failures, and, anyway, a business isn’t a failure until it’s a failure.
Now that interest rates are rapidly moving higher, those startup investments are less of a good deal. VC money is more expensive. VC firms are starting to close out their positions on start-ups that aren’t beating them market, because they want to stick their money somewhere more reliably profitable.
I like your humility, this was well explained and easy to understand.
Business plan… That was the problem, the business plan was just a bunch of cat pics in a binder. Cute, but not so profitable.