The digital comics platform Omnibus emailed the news that it is shutting down and closing up shop. In the announcement, it stated it wasn’t growing fast enough and couldn’t get external funding to “proceed and become sustainable,” blaming the “current landscape.”

The VC funding landscape has changed massively in recent years making it more difficult to raise money but also there’s a shift towards the hottest new trend, currently AI. In years past you’d show promise and a plan, get money, running a loss for some time, to eventually turn a profit and/or be bought out by a larger entity. With the sale of comiXology to Amazon, there was potential for investment but overall, nothing has quite caught fire.

Users will be able to read their books in-app and download backups until August 21st. Since some publishers won’t allow PDF backups, the company is processing “as many refunds as (they) can for (their) super fans.”

The digital comics platform made a splashy debut with a slick design but from the start there were some head scratching decisions. When I used it on launch it was difficult to find any free comics to test out the reading experience, with rather pricy comics and graphic novels being the first thing offered. Runs of comics had issues missing making them difficult to read, and creating a barrier to even want to spend money to do so. Accessing the comics as well felt like a hurdle with an odd choice in how to log in making it a convoluted process. Whether any of that was resolved is unknown to me as I left the app and didn’t look back after an initial negative experience. It felt more focused on flash than user experience.

Omnibus co-founder and head software engineer Kenny Meyers left the company in February 2024 and is on to another tech adventure. When a co-founder leaves like that it raises flags. Add in a lack of communication plan with users and general promotion… and this isn’t much of a surprise.

The platform did line up publishers over its time but in the end, never caught on with readers.