WebProNews

I suspect that Bolt.com has received more traffic in the last few hours than it did in the past week.  Unfortunately (for Bolt), people aren’t using the video-sharing site; they’re looking at its corpse.

“Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased,” states a message on the homepage.  Then - and I’m paraphrasing at this point - it continues, “If we owe you money, or if you want to buy our stuff, contact George E. Shoup, III.”

Mr. Shoup probably started preparing for this attention two weeks ago, when the potential acquisition of Bolt by GoFish fell through.  Or perhaps it was several months earlier, when Bolt promised to pay Universal Music millions of dollars; Universal had filed a copyright infringement suit against the company, and the settlement played a major role in the Bolt-GoFish deal’s failure.

As a result, this final outcome led Read/WriteWeb’s Richard MacManus to comment, “It seems that this is the first major fallout of the YouTube copyright controversies that surfaced once Google acquired YouTube.  While Google has the resources to fight the big media companies, a small company like Bolt.com does not.”

People are already considering the value of the Bolt.com name, though, so there may still be something interesting to find in the site's ashes.