Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we'll split 50/50 anything I make with it, I'll assume all the downside liability.
Posterous can go a lot further. This is a failure of imagination.
Although this is just a subset of their total traffic, they were consistently doubling traffic every 4 months or so.
It really does make me want to take a run at getting the platform from Twitter, if they are in fact going to close it down. I've got the perfect name to rebrand it with, far better than the Posterous name.
Twitter might see serious tax benefits from shutting it down after the acquisition unfortunately. To them it might be worth more dead than alive.
Yep, it had a very real business opportunity.
Obviously once Posterous took the A & B $10 million in venture funding, their clock was seriously ticking. The founders no longer had real control over the company or its future. It wouldn't surprise me if they were diluted down to 10% or less ownership each, which wipes out the incentive to continue with a situation where you're going to see nearly zero payout due to VC terms unless you build an absolute monster company.
No matter what they did, due to the VC they took on, they were unlikely to have a long term time horizon unless they were 'beating' Tumblr. It was get extraordinarily big or go home, because apparently #500 wasn't big enough.
So they bailed, and it probably made perfect sense for their situations.
edit: seems the relaunched with a new design around that time
Tumblr daily pageviews: 500m; Posterous daily pageviews: 1m
Posterous would never be a billion dollar service, but it could be the type of service that generates $10m+ in annual profit.
100 servers from a competent host + bandwidth via a pooling deal = less than $50,000 per month. It wouldn't be sexy, but it'd hold.
I wouldn't keep the current Posterous business model of chasing Tumblr into a pool of red ink. I'd place a bet that users will pay for a service that will stick around. It would reduce usage, but there's a large base to monetize that would be willing to stick around.
1m pageviews a month is about equivalent to 10/second. A single app server can handle that easily. Add on a redundant app server, two database servers, and some static/queue/mail ones, and you're looking at 10 servers _tops_ for that level of traffic (and much more).
"We're really struggling here cap'n":)
Quantcast actually gives 1 million pageviews a day (and not a month), which is, yes, 10/s (and 550 times less than Tumblr).
Either Quantcast numbers are very off, either Posterous can indeed run on very few servers.
(edit: but yeah, you only need 100 servers if you're running something with "enterprise" in the name ;)
100 servers would assume media hosting for images and other files that go with a blog. That could all be kicked out to other services like Amazon, but the costs would obviously go up and I don't think it would be necessary.
At $500k +/- a year in infrastructure costs, I think Posterous could be wildly profitable. You could run a tight ship with five to ten people (throw in $500k to $1m in employee costs). If someone put a gun to your head, it could be maintained with a two or three person team.