Vox
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Vox was Six Apart’s blogging and social-network service, with privacy controls for sharing posts, photos and videos.
02 / Vox FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Vox never built a large audience: with only about 5.7 million monthly unique visitors it had become effectively a ghost town. Its privacy-first positioning was undercut as Facebook improved its privacy controls and users accepted its complexity for free; meanwhile WordPress dominated both public and private blogging, and private blogs perform poorly in search - the main discovery engine for blogs. Parent Six Apart was also spread too thin across MovableType, TypePad, LiveJournal and Pownce, and, facing an imminent merger with VideoEgg, shut Vox down as part of cleaning house.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Platform closed
Six Apart announced that Vox would close on 20 September 2010.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Vox operated as a free service, so there was no paid-subscriber wind-down: on September 2, 2010, Six Apart announced the platform would close permanently, disabled new posts on September 15, and took the site offline on September 30, 2010.
- 02
Users were given export tools to move their blogs to a free TypePad account and their photos and videos to Flickr.
- 03
On September 22, 2010, Six Apart merged with advertising company VideoEgg to form SAY Media; in 2013, Say Media sold the Vox.com domain to Vox Media, which launched its news site on it in 2014.