Creative blogging platform Jux to close August 31, cites growth as not being “large or fast enough”

Update: On July 17, 2013, Jux announced that it would in fact remain open. Our original report is below.

Creative blogging platform Jux is shutting its doors on August 31. In a blog post, the company revealed that its growth wasn’t “large or fast enough to attract further investment” as the reason. It has released a feature that will allow users to download their work.

The New York City-based startup launched in August 2011 as a mixture of Tumblr, About.me, and Flavors.me. As TNW reported back then:

It’s creation. It’s sharing. But it’s also permanent and personal. Jux isn’t about one off creations a la Tumblr. It’s a place where you can create a story, own a topic and be proud of your blogging.

The goal was to help people make better stuff. Prior to launching, company CEO Ted Metcalfe told us that 50,000 people had signed up for the service. The company was founded by Mark Gorton, who created Limewire, the once popular peer-to-peer file sharing client.

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In the past couple of years, Jux has made some steady improvements to making it more accessible and useful for its users. In October 2011, it released a new way to share on the iPad with an HTML5-powered interface. Two months later, it became available on the iPhone before announcing its integration with Google Maps’ Street View and the addition of several social features.

Since its August 2011 launch, Jux said that it has seen a 1,400 percent increase in posts and 3,000 percent growth in page views, with 20 percent of its traffic coming directly from links shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Metcalfe once told us that his company was focused on one main goal, that being growth: “Growth (sans expensive advertising) validates the idea and invigorates the community.” Running up against endless comparisons to Posterous and Tumblr, he believed that Jux would be able to serve as that “fun and magical place” for people to create.

Sadly, Metcalfe’s vision didn’t pan out. Jux managed to raise some funding, but looks like it wasn’t able to capture the attention of investors.

Of course, Jux took to Twitter to announce their news and some users felt that the timing couldn’t have been any worse:

@tactixian timing couldn’t be worse! jux iphone app days from release and tumblr joining best western, err, yahoo, some irrelevant brand :)

— Jux (@JuxDotCom) May 25, 2013

With Posterous already closed after its acquisition by Twitter and rumors of people leaving Tumblr after Yahoo snatched it up, could this offer Jux a bit of a reprieve? Highly doubtful as the company would probably need a huge influx of users to make it sustainable — and it’s not charging users to create their blogs either.

Current users of the site have until August 31 to download their work. To begin, Jux says that users can go to https://USERNAME.jux.com/!/mystuff (where “USERNAME” is the user ID) and a zip file will begin downloading. The company asks users to be patient as the download may take a long time, depending on how much work is stored on the site.

For those interested in migrating their data to another service like WordPress or Tumblr, Jux says that it does not have a feature that will automatically import content into those services.

Update: This post was amended to show that Jux’s site traffic was more than we originally reported.

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