Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Monday, February 2, 2009 at 3:28 PM PT

Honeyshed Shuts Down

Hate to say we told you so (two times), but Honeyshed, the QVC-meets-MTV online video shopping channel, is shutting down, reports AdWeek. The decision to close the Honeyshed doors came after backer Publicis decided to not invest any more money in the endeavor.

The move must have been somewhat sudden because just last Thursday Honeyshed announced it had selected white-label provider Ooyala to power its video.

honeyshed_pok

In November, CEO Stephen Greifer confirmed for us that during its first year, Honeyshed never received more than 7,000 visitors a month. Greifer told AdWeek that after the site rebooted last fall it was getting as many as 15,000 unique visitors per day during its peak, but that number trailed off when the re-launch marketing campaign ended.

Greifer told us in November that the company had 150 brand marketers like Puma using the service and 400 content segments filmed. But Honeyshed was not profitable (obvs), and Greifer wouldn’t provide us with a timeline for when profitability would occur. In explaining the closing of the service to AdWeek, Greifer blamed the bad economy, but we think it’s more basic than that.

For a company that was supposed to reinvent shopping for the digital generation, Honeyshed looked remarkably like every generation of home shopping that preceded it. The hosts may have been younger, but they were doing the same thing as QVC — sitting around talking about how whatever product they were hawking at the moment was cool or would make you cool. That isn’t new; it isn’t cool — and it didn’t work.

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Topic: Hitlines, Startups

Comments (5)

Aw, that’s too bad. I did have a glimmer of hope that this concept might work out. I guess they weren’t able to bring it to market quickly enough and the burn rate must have been incredible given all the content they were generating for the site. Ah well.

Mark Schoneveld — 7:30 AM on February 3, 2009 Reply
- Yes, but did you ever watch it?
  
  Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee — 10:15 AM on February 3, 2009 Reply
Well, no. But I would have. If it hadn’t been a crazy heavy Flash site with a bad user interface. Haha. I wish the concept had been better executed (see: VBS.tv which I just looked up on Compete and it seems to be blowing up 2m+ monthly uniques!).

Just read on AdAge that Publicis put in $25 million into Honeyshed. Wow.

Mark Schoneveld — 11:48 AM on February 3, 2009 Reply
i won a camcorder from the site. hahahaha. i thought it wasn’t bad.

lindsay — 12:20 PM on February 18, 2009 Reply
I also won a Flip Mino video camera from Honeyshed! Its great! Too bad they shut down. :(

Ashley — 1:02 PM on August 17, 2009 Reply

Linkbacks (2)

[...] space has been a hotbed of activity in recent months. Ooyala lost its client Honeyshed (which shut down) one week after a partnership between the two was announced. Digitalsmiths received strategic [...]

thePlatform Goes After Smaller Customers… — 9:44 PM on February 8, 2009
[...] bikes, maybe models playing Nintendo, and people pretending Guerlain mascara was a basic buy. HoneyShed was recently killed by investors; consider it a victim of the economy returning to reality. But you can still watch HoneyShed vids [...]

Video Shopping Sites K Is…. With KRISTOPHER… — 4:48 PM on May 19, 2009