上面两条推特截图，让人无限伤感。一个见证了硅谷无数奇迹的印度小老头，最后，会以这样的方式离开他自己一手打造的公司。事实上，他打造的这个公司也是一个奇迹，作为科技媒体，GigaOM 不输给任何小、巧的科技媒体。这个小老头，可以失去他的公司，但是，不会失去他的幽默感和他的睿智，还有他的键盘。我们一定会再次看到他以某种方式继续给我们讲述硅谷的故事，至少，我们可以看到他长歌当哭，为 GigaOM画上一个圆满的句号。
我在《自媒体的中国故事 vs 博客的美国传奇（第二部分）》 中写了六位美国的著名博客，麦特·德拉吉，阿里安娜·赫芬顿，尼克·丹顿，奥姆·马利克，埃文·威廉姆斯，乔纳森·佩雷帝。其中，我最不看好的，是麦特·德拉吉，因为，这样的激进、报料型博客，这个世界已经不那么需要了；最看好的是奥姆·马利克，因为他做的事情，不大不小，踏踏实实，谁知道，我看走了眼。麦特·德拉吉在最近时代杂志的网络最有影响力的人榜单中遥遥领先，而马利克被扫地出门。
他有两句名言：I love possibilities, I believe in people & imagineering.希望，我们可以面对最好的 possibilities ，希望他的信念给大家带来这位印裔硅谷博客的好消息。
硅谷著名科技博客网站 GigaOM 今天（美国太平洋时间3月9日）发出一条简短的公告，由于无力偿还债务，GigaOM 已停止运营，将听凭债权人发落。
2001年，奥姆·马利克（OM Malik）创办了一个以自己的名字命名的公司和网站GigaOM，一个Web2.0博客网站（a Web2.0 blog）。这个最初由他一个人经营的“自媒体”不断壮大，逐步汇聚了一批卓越的博客与作者，成了他此后的唯一的事业平台，也进入了硅谷最有影响力的科技 博客新闻网站行列。在全球博客50强和CNET最有影响力的100强博客榜单中，GigaOM常常露脸。
GigaOM在互联网泡沫破灭后的谷底创立，然后，伴着硅谷一起再出发、成长。GigaOM几乎见证了此后的每一个硅谷奇迹，并且与这些奇迹的创造者们结下了不解之缘。GigaOM每年都会举办一系列的大小活动，硅谷的大佬们常常会现身来为老朋友捧场。
奥姆·马利克（OM Malik）是一个印度裔的美国科技作家、企业家，他是硅谷著名的科技博客网站GigaOM的创始人，当然，也是这家网站的重要作者。
奥姆1993年移居纽约为《海外印度》杂志撰稿，不久他加盟福布斯杂志，并成为其重要的科技作者。他同时也是著名杂志RedHerring的资深作者。 1994年年底，他创办了一个为印度移民服务的新闻网站。1995年，他参与创办了一份杂志Masala，以及同名的一个南亚门户网站。1997年，奥姆 参与了福布斯网站的创办。1999年，他离开福布斯网站，进入一家著名的风险投资公司出任投资经理。但是，他很快放弃了那份工作，因为，他更喜欢写作，而 不是数钱。
这位才华横溢的科技记者，几年间不断地转轨，始终没有找到自己稳定的定位，他不断地从一个公司转到另一个，不断地创业又不断地失败。
2000年，也就是在互联网第一次泡沫进入巅峰期的时候，他移居到旧金山，成为著名的Business 2.0杂志的高级撰稿人。从此，他和尼克·丹顿一样，开始和科技博客们厮混，并在硅谷扎根下来，未曾离开一步。
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相关报道
快跟Gigaom告别吧！这家老牌科技博客因资金问题撑不下去了！
Recode中文站的报道
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Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram: “I don’t think anyone expected this”
by Chris Thompson Published Mar. 10, 201510:14 pm
At 5:57 Pacific Standard Time yesterday evening, the managers of Gigaom posted one last news story: it was shutting down.
Gigaom, the business and technology news site that was widely regarded as one of the world’s most crucial sources of industry news, shocked that very industry by shutting down last evening, laying off all of its employees, and offering nothing more than acryptic itemon its Web site: “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.”
Phone calls to the company’s West Coast office were met with this equally mysterious notice: “Hello. We are not available now. Please call again. Thank you for your call.”
Just like that, one of Silicon Valley’s must-reads collapsed without a word of warning. According toMathew Ingram, a senior writer at Gigaom and one of the site’s most respected reporters, the staff had no idea that the company was bleeding money so fast. “We all knew we were losing money,” Ingram said. “But we’ve been losing money for eight years. I don’t think anyone expected this.”
In 2006, technology reporter Om Malik founded Gigaom as a Silicon Valley-centered news aggregation site and soon built it into one of the industry’s most-read Web sites, employing roughly 22 editors and writers and attracting 6.4 million viewers a month. The company relied on three revenue streams to recoup its creditors’ investment: research, news reporting, and hosting expensive technology conferences. According to Ingram, reporting was the least lucrative of these ventures, but at least it drew eyeballs to the site.
“It was a great way to get people to see us and build new customers and get people to go to our conferences,” Ingram said.
But as time went on, Ingram added, other news media outlets began to see the value in hosting conferences. And as outlets such as theAtlanticand theNew York Timesbegan organizing high-minded TED Talks, the entrance prices for such conferences began to decline.
“Everyone decided that conferences was a great way to make money. But now everyone has piled onto the market,” Ingram said. “Over time, that decreases your market share.”
As advertising revenue has been wiped out by the rise of Craigslist, Amazon, and Google, media companies have been struggling to find new ways to make money. Om Malik found a way early on by organizing conferences and drawing smart people together for a price. Now the secret is out, and every other outlet is in the game. If gatherings of experts and charging money to hear them talk can’t pay the bills, what can?
Ingram had a feeling something was wrong with Gigaom a few weeks ago. Still, he said, when the hammer came down last night, the mood among the staff was one of surprise and dismay.
“One minute you’re working on a story, and the next minute someone is telling you you don’t have a job, and they’re turning the lights out.”
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Gigaom is dead. Long live Gigaom
Written by Mathew Ingram Mar 14, 2015
Last week, the place I’ve called my online home for over five years — a site that has been one of the leading tech blogs ever since my friend Om Malik started it in the Starbucks at the corner of Clay and Battery in San Francisco in 2006 — suddenly shut down. Gigaom was always more than just a job for me, and its ending has hit me like the sudden death of a close friend. Likemanyofmyformercolleagues, I am still trying to process all of the feelings and thoughts its closure has triggered and understand why and how it happened. I consider this post part of that process — I’m certainly not claiming to have any definitive answers.
Everyone wants to know why Gigaom failed, andwhat it says aboutthe online media market. I feel as though I should know, if only because I was one of the site’s media writers, and I have written so many times about the challenges other online outlets have faced. In fact, I’ve heard from more than one person who sees Gigaom’s death as some kind of karmic retribution for my past criticism of outlets like theNew York Times— and perhaps it is. Frankly, it’s as good an explanation as any other.
For me, the business realities and technical aspects of Gigaom are all tied up with my feelings about the place, and about my friend Om Malik, who took a crazy gamble and quit his job to start a blog, and eventually built what I consider to be one of the best teams of writers and editors I’ve ever worked with. I have zero regrets about agreeing to leave a comfy newspaper job and join him in that quest, despite the unfortunate way it ended. Was it the best online media business ever? No. But it was a pleasure and a privilege to work there, and I am proud of what we accomplished.
If there’s one thing that bothers me about the site’s sudden closure, it’s that it might jeopardize the careers of or influence how people see my colleagues — excellent writers and editors likeStacey HigginbothamandKatie FehrenbacherandJanko RoettgersandLaura OwenandKevin TofelandDerrick HarrisandKevin FitchardandDavid MeyerandJeff RobertsandBarb DarrowandKif LeswingandJonathan VanianandBiz CarsonandSigne BrewsterandCarmel DeAmicis. If you haven’t already reached out to hire them, you should. They are rock stars, and they don’t deserve to have their work denigrated in this way, with bank trustees telling them to turn in their laptops and shut off the lights when they leave.
I’ve talked to several media outlets about Gigaom’s death — includingDigidayand thePoynter Instituteand theColumbia Journalism Review— and that has helped me think through some of the issues around the closure and what it means (although I am still processing it). Was Gigaom killed by its reliance on outside venture capital, assome have argued? In part, I think it was. As I mentioned in one interview, VC money is a Faustian bargain of the first order: it gives you the freedom to grow quickly, but it also puts pressure on a company to show meteoric growth, and there is a harsh penalty for not doing so — and the media industry isn’t exactly known for meteoric growth of the kind VCs like to see.
One aspect that many people are ignoring, however, is that Gigaom also took on debt, via a financing with several lenders including Silicon Valley Bank, in an attempt to juice its growth even further. In a different kind of market or at a different time, this might have worked — but ultimately the company failed to produce enough cash to service that debt, and I think that is part of what took it down (peter Kafka at Re/codehasmore on that). Creditors are orders of magnitude less accommodating than shareholders or equity investors, and they tend to be a lot more nervous. When they want their money, all the happy stories about future growth that startups tell VCs mean nothing.
Was Gigaom also killed by the merciless evolution of the online media market? I think to some extent that’s true as well —as I told CJR, when Gigaom started, and even up to a few years ago, having a staff of 50 and 6 million unique visitors a month would have seemed like a huge success. But in a world in which behemoths like BuzzFeed and Vice are the paragons of virtue, with thousands of staff and massive traffic, Gigaom must have looked like a pipsqueak, and that affects everything from advertising to funding.
There’s a sort of barbell effect: If you are super small and super focused and super niche you can succeed, arguably. And if you’re super huge and mass and gigantic and growing quickly, you can succeed. But in the middle, is death. The valley of death. So arguably we got caught in that valley of death.
The other aspect of the business is that Gigaom has never been just an editorial operation that lived and died on advertising. One of the most innovative aspects of the Gigaom model was that it had three legs: ad-funded editorial, events (conferences), and a subscription research arm where analysts wrote reports for corporate clients. I still believe that this model can work, despite what some might argue is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s very similar to the model that a publisher likeThe Economistuses, for example. Ad-supported editorial helps build a relationship with readers, and events and subscription products eventually monetize that relationship, if everything works properly.
I don’t have — and never did have — access to the in-depth financial aspects of Gigaom’s business (and perhaps I should have, as my former colleague Celeste LeCompte arguedin a recent Nieman Lab piece). But my understanding of what happened is that the editorial side of the business was not the problem. Was it hugely profitable? No. But was it doing any worse than plenty of other editorial outlets in terms of revenue or cash flow? No — in fact, quite a bit better than many, as far as I can tell. But ultimately the research arm seems to have failed to generate enough cash to justify the money that investors (and creditors) lent us to build it. Whose fault is that? I honestly have no idea. Was the model flawed, or just the execution of it? Again, I simply don’t know.
Some have argued that Gigaom was guilty of an excess of hubris, and that instead of trying to grow into something so quickly, it should have taken the slower approachof a niche site like Search Engine Land. There is certainly nothing wrong with that idea — sites like Danny Sullivan’s or Jessica Lessin’sThe Information, or Mike Masnick’sTechDirt, or Ben Thompson’s tech analysis blogStratecheryare great examples of how small can be good. But that doesn’t mean creating such a site is the only way to go — others would like to reach for the stars, and that desire is a big part of what makes Silicon Valley what it is: an infuriating place filled with hubris and ego, but also a great example of what people can achieve when they push themselves.
Did Gigaom fail in its attempt to reach that goal? Yes. But that doesn’t mean the goal wasn’t worthwhile, or that what we built while striving to reach it was any less great. I would like to thank my friend Om for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, and I would like to thank all of my colleagues for the pleasure of working with one of the best editorial teams on the planet. I am happy to call you my friends as well as my former co-workers and colleagues. It was a great ride. Onward!
