In a recent post, I threw out a number for the amount of Serve/Bluebird shutdowns as around half. A reader took me to task on this, asking where I got that number so I decided to take a better look.
- Serve Shut Down spreadsheet via r/churning, has over 200 reports
- Serve Shut Down poll via Dansdeals, has over 1,400 reports
Both the spreadsheet and the poll have around half accounts shut down and half still alive. At the time of this writing, the spreadsheet has 113 alive birds and 100 dead birds; the poll has 551 alive birds and 613 dead birds.
If you look closer at the metadata of the spreadsheet, it becomes clear a large part of the live accounts are those opened within the past few months. The cutoff seems to be November 1, 2015; accounts opened after that date are largely unaffected by the closures.
When narrowing our search to accounts opened in October 2015 and earlier, it’s around 2/3 shutdown and 1/3 still live. And some of the ones remaining open are accounts that weren’t active much and had no reason to be closed.
In short, the large majority of MS (manufacture spend) accounts were closed and most likely closures will follow on newer accounts who MS.
Quite a massacre.
