Founder, Sol Lipman explains in a note on 12seconds, “As you probably know, everything has a life cycle. 12seconds is in its twilight. After all the new product launches and attempts at a revenue model, fundraising with VCs and late night coding sessions with Jacob hunched over his monitors – it’s time to call it. It is time to end 12seconds.”
12seconds is closing for a variety of reasons that range from lack of capital to lack of business plan. They may also be considered one of the first victim’s of the consolidation around Twitter’s ecosystem. Twitter has forged relationships with a variety of applications in its ecosystem, most notably around the new launch of its site. 12seconds, however, never made the cut.
As reported by Mashable, 12seconds traffic has remained stagnant over the last two of the company’s three years. And while there may be a group of ardent fans eager to explore “twitter for video”, the idea never really took off. They grew to 200,000 users, largely early adopters, but could not top that number. Add the increasingly expensive cost of hosting video online and little ad revenue and it’s not surprising to see their doors closing.
12seconds fostered a unique environment for video creators. Lipman told the Guardian, “”My first baby was born and a lot of that experience was on 12seconds,” said Lipman. “A guy from Iran used it every day and I’d never seen regular life in Iran before. People like Bill Cosby used it and we saw into his life, and Imogen Heap used to use it to test out different versions of songs. There was such a kind and encouraging community… and all the moments of the life cycle were shared on video. That was unique and really special.”
Fortunately for 12seconds users, a download tool will be made available later this week, allowing users to download their videos.
