Parler’s New Owner Shuts Down Site: ‘No Reasonable Person Believes Twitter For Conservatives Is A Viable Business Model’

Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted it was just no fun when they couldn’t whine about how victimized they were.
Anyway, the site is dead now. You may recall there were stories last fall of Kanye West buying the site, which we noted appeared to be the failed site (with around 50,000 daily active users) trying to take advantage of a troubled rich guy. That deal quickly fell apart.
On Friday, it was announced that Parlement, the company that owned Parler had sold the site to a company named Starboard, which simultaneously announced it was shutting the site down. Both Parlement and Starboard are smallish companies trying to cater to the Trumpist world with digital services.
It’s not at all clear why one would buy the site just to shut it down, but the CEO of Starboard claimed he still hoped to “retain the platform’s audience.” But… elsewhere he admitted that there’s no real market for a Trumpist social media network.

“No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” Arlington, Va.-based digital media company Starboard said in announcing Friday that it had acquired Parler.

Basically, it sounds like what Starboard really bought was a marketing list of Parler users that Starboard is going to try to onboard to its other products.

“Parler’s large user base and additional strategic assets represent an enormous opportunity for Starboard to continue to build aggressively in our media and publishing business,” Starboard CEO Ryan Coyne said in a statement. “The team at Parler has built an exceptional audience and we look forward to integrating that audience across all of our existing platforms.”

Except that, by all accounts, most of Parler’s users had abandoned the site for any of the other Trump supporting micro-blogging sites like Gettr, Truth Social, or Twitter.
Anyway, there’s not much more to say about this one, but it seemed worth marking the passing of one of the many failed social media sites that seemed to think that there was a market for catering to out-of-touch insecure assholes with inferiority complexes, by promising them that they could be as horrible as they wanted to be with no consequences.