NatMags managing director Jessica Burley told Media Week it had been unable to overcome marketing and distribution challenges over the 20-week test period.
"If we had started out with a bigger database and without such a large marketing burden, it could have been different," she said. "It's revenue versus costs. You would really need something in the region of one million names."
Flash applications often being blocked, particularly in the corporate environment, where it targeted young women in offices, meant bounce-backs were high. Hotmail spam filters also caused problems.
Burley added: "We didn't get as many sign-ups as we would have liked. If we were to constantly feed it with marketing over a protracted period of time to build up the database it would not make financial sense."
Jellyfish launched in March targeting 13 to 19-year-old girls, but was repositioned after eight weeks for women aged 18 to 25.
Dennis Publishing's digi-mag Monkey reported period-on-period growth of 17% last week in only its second set of ABCe figures, now with a circulation of 245,404.
Burley said Monkey always had a headstart on Jellyfish. "Dennis had a fantastic database to start off with," she admitted.
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