Brijit: Death of another Startup

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future.

So reads the home page of Brijit, a startup that sought to bring quality content to folks by paying reviewerss $5 per review to summarize high quality articles in major media. The website was a sort of search and navigation of the high end press. Brijit was even in the process of increasing their (very modest) levels of traffic.

Why would this startup fail after initial investment of at least 1 million? The $5 per article didn't break this bank. With only 16,000 article total they only spent $80,000 on the content. But I think this is a great example of how difficult it is to generate online revenues. Online publishing companies that have robust advertising generally must have a valuable type of audience and have huge levels of traffic. Brijit may have had an *intelligent* audience, but I'm guessing most of the users were using the site to create their own derivative works or find material for their own writing projects. This audience was probably unlikely to click off to advertising for pencils and paper or magazine subscriptions, and even if they did click Brijit was only seeing about 20k-30k visitors per month - not enough to generate more than a few thousand in even highly targeted, high CPM advertising.