Posterous

Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off

Acquired & killed
19902026

Posterous let you start a blog by sending an email. No signup, no editor, just a message to [email protected] with your photos attached, and a site appeared. Twitter bought the company in 2012 for its engineers and shut the service the following year. One of its founders immediately built Posthaven so people could keep their sites.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2008
  2. May 2008 Launch
    Posterous launches

    Send an email, get a blog. No signup required first.

  3. 2010
  4. 2010 Peak
    The recommended way to start writing

    Auto-posting to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, plus custom domains.

  5. 2012
  6. 12 March 2012 Acquisition
    Twitter buys Posterous

    An acqui-hire. The service is said to keep running for now.

  7. 2013
  8. 15 February 2013 Shutdown announced
    Ten weeks to export

    Twitter sets the closing date at 30 April 2013.

  9. 15 February 2013 Revival
    Posthaven is announced

    A co-founder builds a paid service that promises never to shut down.

  10. 30 April 2013 Shutdown
    Posterous closes

The site through time

Browse posterous.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Posterous, Inc. 2008–2012 Founded Y Combinator, San Francisco
Twitter 2012–2013 Acquisition Acquired for the engineering team

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Twitter acquired Posterous in March 2012 for the engineering team. On 15 February 2013 Twitter announced the service would close on 30 April 2013, offering an export tool.

Our analysis: This was an acqui-hire and nothing was hidden about it. Twitter wanted the people, kept them, and closed the product they came with. What made it sting is that Posterous hosted other people's writing, so the cost of the deal was paid by users who were never party to it.

History [edit]

The lowest possible barrier

Posterous started in May 2008 out of Y Combinator, and its whole pitch was one sentence: email [email protected] and you have a blog. Attach photos, MP3s, documents or video and they were laid out for you. No account needed first, no editor to learn, no theme to pick.

It also pushed automatically to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, which in 2008 was genuinely useful, and it let you point your own domain at it. For a couple of years it was the tool people recommended to anyone who said they wanted to write but not deal with software.

Bought for the people

Twitter acquired Posterous in March 2012. Twitter said what these deals usually mean: the team was joining, and the service would keep running for now.

On 15 February 2013 the notice came. Posterous would shut down on 30 April, with an export tool provided in the meantime. That gave users ten weeks to get their writing and photos out.

Posthaven

Garry Tan, one of the founders, announced Posthaven on the same day as the shutdown notice: a paid, deliberately small blogging service whose founding promise was that it would never be sold and never shut down, because the subscription had to cover the cost of keeping every site online permanently.

It exists to this day. It is one of the few cases in this encyclopedia where somebody responded to a shutdown by building the thing that would not do it again.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Open Diary Invented the comment, in 1998 1998–2014 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Typepad Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years 2003–2025 Yahoo! 360° Left in beta for four years, then quietly ended 2005–2009

Sources [edit]

  1. Posterous Will Shut Down On April 30th TechCrunch 15 February 2013 [archived]
  2. Posterous Beats Tumblr In Simplicity TechCrunch 28 June 2008 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).