Last week the CEO and a founder of Post News, Noam Bardin, announced that Post News will be shutting down this May. Post News is one of the alternative social media platform that has launched in recent years as an alternative to more established websites like X and Facebook. Post News distinguished itself from other social media platforms by its efforts to provide users access to premium content and news articles without fully subscribing to news organizations.
While the website provided ad-free content from publishers like Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and other content providers, Post's intention was to have users make micropayments to read the articles instead of a subscription to each publication. While micropayments for content has been a proposed business model for years it apparently remains a hard concept for the general public to fully understand and get behind such efforts.
While users may not have fully taken to a micropayment experience platform, Post did seem to crack the code in allowing users to tip content creators as well as those making high-valued comments to a post. Besides a tipping system, in my opinion Post also did a phenomenal job with its verification system to provide profile checkmarks by requiring one to verify with a government ID, provide a current selfie image, and a link from a self-owned website to the Post profile. In the end though, none of these efforts by Post News was enough to provide the community growth necessary to main the social media platform.
In the April 19, 2024 post, Mr. Bardin wrote:
It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.
We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.
In the next few weeks, we will be exploring a few long-shot options but we wanted to give you a heads up.
For those that continue to seek alternative social media platforms, I have three recommendations for you. For those seeking a more federated social media platform and Twitter-like experience, I would encourage you to look into Mastodon and Bluesky which are federated systems. However, if you're looking for a site similar to Post News and perhaps a more walled-garden approach then I also highly recommend you join Spoutible. Spoutible has a similar vibe to Post News with a lot of its focus on attempting to create the "toxicity-free" community that Post News had also hoped to maintain.
A version of this story was originally posted on socPub.