Why Rayneer went bankrupt
Despite a 2-million investment, the personalized music television channel Rayneer went bankrupt. The Sonntagszeitung reported on the circumstances behind the bankruptcy.
The startup Rayneer, which wanted to shake up the market with personalized music television, closed a financing round of two million francs a year ago. Well-known investors such as Zürcher Kantonalbank and Goldbach Group were on board. Rayneer switched on the Internet TV Wilmaa a short time later. Now the company is bankrupt.
The end comes as a surprise, according to the Sonntagszeitung. Rayneer was one of the "high flyers of the Swiss start-up scene". According to its own data, Rayneer had around 100,000 unique users per month. Still, that wasn't enough to avert bankruptcy, it said. "In hindsight, we know that we would have needed significantly more money," Flückiger tells the Sonntagszeitung. "We invested a lot of money in marketing, mainly in TV advertising on private stations." The cost of label contracts also proved to be the undoing of personalized music television. For each music video of Rihanna, Bligg and Co. the company had to pay money.
Strong pressure to make a lot of money with advertising
As free music television, Rayneer was dependent on showing viewers as much advertising as possible. Rayneer's undoing was that they focused too early and too much on monetization, the Sunday newspaper writes in this regard - probably also due to pressure from investors. The pressure to earn as much money as possible through advertising allowed Rayneer to "care too little about the needs of the users," as Flückiger tells the Sonntagszeitung.
