Learn how to validate your startup idea by pre-selling it, for only $80 (includes a free 1-hour consultancy call).

Delicious

Bookmarking website to save, organize and discover links
Startup Cemetery

Don't be the average security professional that spends 4,300 hours annually to maintain compliance. Simplify your audits and reduce your workload with G2's 5-star rated compliance automation platform.

Get started →
GENERAL INFORMATION
Category:
Productivity
Country:
United States
Started:
2003
BUSINESS FAILURE
Outcome:
Still Active
Cause:
Acquisition Flu
Closed:
2017
FOUNDERS & EMPLOYEES
Number of Founders:
1
Name of Founders:
Joshua Schachter
Number of Employees:
50-100
FUNDING
Number of Funding Rounds:
1
Total Funding Amount:
No Data
Number of Investors:
10

Don't be the average security professional that spends 4,300 hours annually to maintain compliance. Simplify your audits and reduce your workload with G2's 5-star rated compliance automation platform.

Get started →

What was Delicious?

Delicious was a social bookmarking site that was founded in the year 2003 by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov. It was created to be different from other bookmarking platforms by enabling its users to store and share bookmarks.

Delicious also let users access their saved bookmarks anywhere, anytime. It was free and allowed visitors to group links, save homepages, and work collaboratively with other users too. Delicious went on to become one of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the internet.

Why did Delicious fail and shut down?

There are a few reasons that slowly but inevitably caused the downfall of this once-promising startup.

Delicious was a pretty good site before it was sold to Yahoo! in 2007. Two years later, even the founder regretted accepting the offer. Yahoo was already a giant back then and Delicious and its team were a very small part of it which became largely neglected.

Launching the new version of the site after the acquisition was supposed to take 6 months, but, instead, it dragged on and didn’t see the light until two years later. The site was also buggy and there were frequent technical problems.

By that time other tools similar to Delicious were already dominating the sector, Pinterest, Trello, Evernote, Pinboard, Pocket, were only some of them.

Besides the competitive factor, there is also to say that when Delicious was launched, it was very useful in searching for information through bookmarks a user or other registered people had already saved since Google was not as powerful as it currently is.

When search engines started crawling and indexing billions of websites it became easier for people to find relevant content so the need for what Delicious offered decreased over the years.

The site went from one ownership to another until it was finally bought by its then competitor, Pinboard, for a bargain.

Go on Reading

The All-In-One Newsletter for Startup Founders

90% of startups fail. Learn how not to with our weekly guides and stories. Join +40,000 other startup founders!

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.