GigaOm, an early and prominent WordPress site, shuts down

It’s a sad day when a seemingly successful niche news operation shuts down. GigaOm stopped operations last night, due to an inability to pay their creditors.

GigaOm was started by Om Malik and Om went full time on the project in 2006, as I discovered from Matt Mullenweg’s blog. Om and Matt are good friends; Om even interrupted an interview Matt did for Nieman Labs’ Riptide project I covered in 2013, by showing up at Matt’s house during the recording.

GigaOm had early backing from True Ventures, where Om now works. True Ventures was also an early backer of Automattic. A few prominent WordPress community members have worked on GigaOm at one time or another, and the site was a WordPress.com VIP customer.

It’s sad to see something like this go away. There are some great tech writers at GigaOm. The postmortems for GigaOm are plentiful, but this post from Danny Sullivan about growing  a digital media company without investment was my favorite.