[geofft]

Why did you need to find this? Was this a pressure from investors, or did you determine internally that growth wouldn't eventually take off, ever?

(One of the things that worries me a lot about taking venture capital is the pressure to grow quickly over growing well / sustainably, so I'm pretty curious about this....)

[nebabyte]

Practically any monetization effort is a function of the number of users - a percent of users paying is still a percent.

If they're not seeing the demand it's smarter to cut losses than to continue on without a plan to make the site sustainable.