Shutting down Artifact
One of the few apps that I really looked forward to...What went wrong? What's next?
I completely replaced all of my news apps after I installed Artifact back in early 2023. I even wrote my initial thoughts about the platform and I really thought this app was here to stay. But the reality is different now it seems.
Like every day, I start my days by checking news and updates on Artifact, and as of today, I have a streak of 279 days. But yesterday I saw that some features are missing in the app. So I searched for their blog and found this article.
It was really a shock for me. I mean, I don't understand why they're shutting down now when they launched a brand new landing page one month back. But after reading the entire blog, the CEO is mentioning this “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.”
This got me thinking, and now I felt like they lost direction or they changed their mission and vision. I mean, they included posts and links section, along with AI-generated images and all other small features. For what? Why? What was their original plan to make money from this platform?
I got this feeling when I first stumbled on to Artifact that finally I can replace all other bullshit news and updates. That was my main reason for selecting Artifact as a source of news. It helped me to focus on the things that matter to me. It helped me to learn about an update even though that article is big enough with its summarize tool. I got a lot of traffic to my blog from Artifact. Really thankful for that!
But like the CEO (Kevin Systrom) said;
News and information remain critical areas for startup investment. We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies.
This is a concern of matter in the era of AI.
Artifact is the second platform that shut down after a major rebrand, the other one was Pebble. What’s happening in the startup world?
Is it fail fast, fail cheap saying in action?
Now I have to go back to again to Google News. I’ll never touch Microsoft News as it is more chaotic (at least to me).
I wish the team behind Artifact all the best. It was a good run and you all made a great product. I hope you all will come up with a great idea soon.
On another note, Substack is also facing a lot of heat these days. More below.
