Office Pirates: Not a New Art Form

Office Pirates gets canned.

From MediaPost:

"Ned Desmond, president of Time Inc. Interactive, informed employees of the move Friday. Desmond said Time decided to devote its resources to other projects, including an upcoming online humor initiative with Sports Illustrated. "Office Pirates was off to a good start--and it is likely to reach nearly 11 million page views this month--but the business still faced a long road," stated Desmond in a memo to employees. "It was a hard decision, but we decided to shift Office Pirates' resources elsewhere."

The site was designed to appeal to young online males, with links to Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and features like "Women Walking Around at Lunchtime," showcasing young women photographed on the street. But, while Office Pirates tried very hard to be funny, the jokes often fell flat."

ClickZ:

"Office Pirates is set to sink on September 1, roughly six months after its launch in February. Measured against other humor sites, the site never rose above a rank of 115, according to Hitwise. Viacom's Comedy Central ranks eighth, and Heavy.com holds the largest market share, with 17.8 percent of traffic in the online humor space. Blogs like Wall Street Folly and Deal Breaker began predicting the site's demise earlier this month."

New York Post:

"It launched with some word-of-mouth fanfare in late February when it spiked up to 13 million viewers a day in its first month, according to the Web trafficking monitor Alexa.com.

Ironically, after slumping below 5 million page views, it was suddenly surging back to its early heights in the normally slow-traffic month of August. But it still ranked at 19,767 among all Web sites monitored, according to Alexa. That put it behind sites such as Gawker.com, ranked 3,031 or Wonkette, ranked 8,617."