Joost Assets Acquired by UK Vertical Ad Firm Adconion

Joost is dead, long live Joost.

Buried in the noise leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday on Tuesday, the English vertical ad firm Adconion has announced in an understated press release that it has purchased all of Joost’s core assets, effectively shutting down the service, despite promises to continue to “operate the service in its current form”, which is code for “we bought this for the platform and don’t care about content.”

This follows a tumultuous year for the beleaguered video portal once believed to be the “YouTube killer” that never was, even with backing from US TV network CBS, releasing an iPhone app that allowed access to its content library in December and announcing its change of focus to white label platform services in July.

Joost was at first known for its desktop application that served up video in a P2P fashion owing to the company’s founders being involved in the development of Kazaa and Skype, but by the time the application was made available for mass consumption, YouTube and Hulu already had a foothold in the online video marketplace and Joost wasn’t seen as the killer app that all of the hype seemed to suggest it would be.

This led to the desktop application being discontinued late last year in favor of a more conventional Flash-based delivery system which still did little to improve its stagnating traffic numbers compared to the above competing services, which flourished exponentially compared to Joost with the October 2008 ComScore numbers confirming its rapid decline into irrelevance.

Joost was also known for being one of the first video portals to offer legal streaming anime, which led to some success as it secured streaming rights to Naruto Shippuden in January before being forgotten once again in the wake of Crunchyroll, Viz and Hulu offering the same simulcast.

The company also became mired in internal strife with its former CEO Mike Volpi during the year, culminating in the resignation from the position, then being ousted as Chairman which led to the company board of directors suing him, to add insult to injury.

The following is a quote by Volpi given in 2008 to CNET shortly after the portal’s relaunch after discontinuing the desktop application:

“As a company, internally, we finally turned the corner in the late summer, there’s enough funding to last well into next year,” Volpi added, and said that he “hopes to make Joost profitable late in 2009″.

Yeah, doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anymore.