*One of the many joys of formerly-new media is that, instead of shutting down a TV series or a movie franchise, you can obliterate an entire world.
*I can't beat the remark of several wags on Twitter that "there is no There there."
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2010/03/therecom-shutting-down-on-march-9th11.html
March 02, 2010
There.com Shutting Down On March 9th
Today Makena has announced that it is closing down its virtual world, There.com, on March 9th. The company has always been tight lipped about its user base–I can't remember hearing a growth update in any recent months before my hiatus–but it continued to draw in brands to either sell virtual goods or build virtual spaces. Unfortunately, that hasn't been enough.
(((Unfortunately, it wasn't named "temporarily-there.com," either.)))
Makena Technologies will be continuing with "some exciting educational projects in process, which [it] will continue to service." The entertainment-driven, branded space, though, will close.
The announcement alone cites Coca-Cola, CosmoGirl, Bebe, K-SWISS, and SPIN as players in virtual world and last year saw several others as well. However, There.com made its revenue on both brand partnerships and virtual goods sales. CEO Mike Wilson says in the announcement that because it worked to maintain a broadly accessible world, its users were hard hit by the recession.
"While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise," wrote Wilson. "At the end of the day, we can't cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There's nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can't support itself doesn't work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were 'directionally correct' and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive." (...)
