Bubble, Bubble, Bubble
The startup ranks are starting to thin. We've added three companies to the TechCrunch DeadPool in the last week (Raw Sugar, FilmLoop and Browster). Even Google got into the spirit of things when they shut down Google Answers at the end of the year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Through 2006 the corpus framed 'Bubble 2.0' mostly as rhetoric: Techdirt mocked a barely-revenue company expecting to IPO in January 2006, Publishing 2.0 argued the following month that the bubble was a media construct rather than a capital one, and by November the New York Times was cataloguing free consumer giveaways like AOL's in the same vein.
This piece marks where the debate meets hard outcomes: TechCrunch confirms three shutdowns in one week — Raw Sugar, FilmLoop and Browster all enter its DeadPool, with Google also confirmed to have closed Google Answers at year-end. The significance is that the failure ledger now has a running, public scoreboard, giving the bubble argument a measurable denominator instead of dueling op-eds.
First-order effects
- Founders, staff and backers of Raw Sugar, FilmLoop and Browster are out of operating businesses this week, and Google Answers users have lost the service outright at year-end 2006.
- TechCrunch's DeadPool becomes the de facto public registry for these failures, converting individual shutdowns into a visible weekly count.
Second-order effects
- Investors weighing 2007 consumer-web deals now have named cautionary examples against the thin-revenue profiles Techdirt flagged in early 2006, raising the bar for funding lookalike startups.
- Incumbents like Google demonstrate that pruning applies at every scale — when even an incumbent retires a long-tail product, small players' shutdowns read as a market-wide discipline rather than isolated stumbles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Web 2.0 cohort consolidates around a survivor set while public failure tracking — DeadPools, closure announcements — becomes standing infrastructure for judging whether the era was overfunded or merely normalizing.
The trend: The Web 2.0 funding cycle is entering its winnowing phase, where public failure ledgers replace bubble rhetoric as the measure of which consumer startups survive.