Spotplex initally launched as service which served up popular stories by monitoring how many people read them (a potential Digg killer). Then, the owners decided to turn Spotlex into an Alexa-like analytics service. However, neither of these worked out for Spotlex and they’ve now joined the deadpool.

Having co-founded DialPad (acquired by Yahoo in 2005), you would have thought that CEO Doyon Kim knew the industry pretty well. Well, it seems he doesn’t when he claimed that Spotlex failed due to funding issues. He said that the company had underestimated the resources needed to build and maintain Spolex and had also neglected to seek further venture funding after its seed round ($450,000)

Spotlex set itself apart from the like’s of Digg by requiring no intervention by the reader (digging the story) to promote a page. However, it only recorded the hits to sites which included a Javascript snippet which in essence didn’t really help the company show the stories which were popular by readers.

Spotplex also used the JavaScript embeds to offer an analytics service, with the aim of competing with Alexa which also had problems due to the fact that it didn’t really show true traffic ratings of websites.

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