Circa 1605, Inc., the makers of the Circa News application, have ceased trading after failing to find a buyer for the site.

The site went on the market in April after the company failed to raise a new round of funding to keep it going. Despite suggestions of several potential buyers at the time, none came to the party and acquired it.

Founded in 2011, Circa was a news reading application that claimed to be the “first born-on-mobile news experience.”

The app delivered a curated mix of news, or what it called “comprehensive yet to-the-point news updates paired with an engrossing mobile experience,” which in reality was primarily rewriting the news of the day in a point-to-fact manner that was certainly easy to read, but did very little in the way of value adding.

“Producing high-quality news can be a costly endeavor and without the capital necessary to support further production we are unable to continue,” Circa Co-Founder Matt Gilligan said in a post announcing the news on Medium.

“Our mission was always to create a news company where factual, unbiased, and succinct information could be found,” he added.

Always going to fail

While Circa was briefly all the rage in 2012, the app was always going to fail for two primary reasons: it copied a newspaper model, and it never even bothered once to earn an income, you know that thing businesses need to keep afloat and pay bills when the venture capital runs out.

Circa’s model of lead stories followed by sub-sectioned news, again slanted towards what they thought were the stories people wanted to read is an established model, one established by print newspapers.

In 2015, as has indeed been the case for a significant number of years, specialization catering to niches are often the key drivers when in comes to news; sure, there are the Buzzfeed’s of the world, but they seriously build on news, and not always with animated gifs, and actually strive to break news as a source, whereas Circa could have been described as rehashed AP and Reuters news feeds with little added value.

The main reason they’re going tits-up though is the lack of income, or more specifically in Circa’s case: no income at all.

If this wasn’t written by someone who co-founded a VC funded company, you’d think they were taking the piss; Gilligan again:

Our ongoing plan was to monetize Circa News through the building of a strategy we had spent a long time developing but unfortunately we were unable to close a significant investment prior to becoming resource constrained. We could have compromised and included off-the-shelf advertisements or charged a subscription for the product but we never felt like any of the simplest solutions would pair well with the high-quality experience we wished to achieve, or even bring in enough to make a difference.

Yeah, you’re founded in 2011 and you do nothing for that entire time to raise so much as a dime in revenue, and then you carry on about “compromise” and other bullshit excuses such as making money didn’t “pair well with the high-quality experience we wished to achieve.”

Earth to space station Circa: that high-quality experience you wished to achieve is no longer, because of your elitist snobbery and possibly even having enough brain cells to realize after four years that, hello, businesses need to make money to survive.

You really have to worry how people with these views raise venture capital.

Circa burned on the proverbial fire of snobbery and lack of reality $5.7 million prior to closure, from investors including Advancit Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Alex Bard, Menlo Ventures, Quotidian Ventures, and various others.