Time Inc. Sinks Office Pirates
Posted on August 25, 2006
Time Inc. is shutting down its online humor attempt called Office Pirates. The site got off to an uneasy start when the Office Pirates blog called every single post on the blog a blog. It was a blog full of blogs instead of blog posts. We also noted some other quirks with the site when it debuted in February, 2006.
The Office Pirates blog archives page also contains these odd words: "old blogs, stacked high like pancakes. Or babies." Fortunately, each RSS entry is not on its own feed. But we had no idea that RSS feeds make noises like Krapow!. Office Pirates says "Sizzle! Snap! Krapow! That's the sound of Office Pirates being served up to you daily via RSS." That's just depressing.Office Pirates improved since its February debut but the improvement and 11.5 million pageviews were not enough to convince Time Warner to keep the site. This site may have failed but Time isn't giving up on humor.
AdAge is reporting that Time Inc. will be giving humor another shot next year. AdAge says Time Interactive president Ned Desmond told employees in a memo, "Office Pirates was off to a good start - and it is likely to reach nearly 11 million page views this month - but the business still faced a long road...Time Inc. will return to online humor early next year with a new initiative from Sports Illustrated."
MediaWeek also reported earlier this month that Office Pirates faced rough seas. 11 million page views not being enough shows you how big media thinks.
