Honeyshed Shuts Down

Hate to say we told you so (two times), but Honeyshed, the QVC-meets-MTV online video shopping channel, is shutting down, reports AdWeek. The decision to close the Honeyshed doors came after backer Publicis decided to not invest any more money in the endeavor.

The move must have been somewhat sudden because just last Thursday Honeyshed announced it had selected white-label provider Ooyala to power its video.

In November, CEO Stephen Greifer confirmed for us that during its first year, Honeyshed never received more than 7,000 visitors a month. Greifer told AdWeek that after the site rebooted last fall it was getting as many as 15,000 unique visitors per day during its peak, but that number trailed off when the re-launch marketing campaign ended.

Greifer told us in November that the company had 150 brand marketers like Puma using the service and 400 content segments filmed. But Honeyshed was not profitable (obvs), and Greifer wouldn’t provide us with a timeline for when profitability would occur. In explaining the closing of the service to AdWeek, Greifer blamed the bad economy, but we think it’s more basic than that.

For a company that was supposed to reinvent shopping for the digital generation, Honeyshed looked remarkably like every generation of home shopping that preceded it. The hosts may have been younger, but they were doing the same thing as QVC — sitting around talking about how whatever product they were hawking at the moment was cool or would make you cool. That isn’t new; it isn’t cool — and it didn’t work.

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