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As Staff Flees, TechCrunch’s Traffic Plummets
- shingen 15y agoAOL's share price has been flying high?!? Their stock price is down 25% since they purchased TechCrunch (no direct correlation implied); while the Dow and Nasdaq are hitting multi year highs. This is a company that has lost 80% of its value since the days when Google signed their big search deal with them putting a $10 billion value on the company - to say nothing of the long term disaster at AOL. And not to mention that they've gone from a cash generating machine just a few years ago, courtesy of the dying dial-up business, to currently bleeding to death. I used to read TechCrunch daily while Arrington was at the helm. He kept it interesting, and they often had big scoops. I find that HackerNews has completely replaced my need to check in with TechCrunch to keep up on what's going on. Ars Technica is one of the few other sources I keep up with regularly. TechCrunch just seems like a complete joke by comparison these days.
- yuhong 15y agoNot that Arrington itself did not have it's problems, though.
- shingen 15y agoAbsolutely, but you'll typically find huge eccentricities of character in someone capable of doing what Arrington did. I doubt you can separate his character from his results. He was like a pitbull latching on to the slightest hint of a scoop.
- joering2 15y agoyes, but wasn't it the same attitude that actually got plenty of Angels to turn back on him? I cant recall certain articles but at some point VCs literally were avoiding him for unwilling to wait with breaking the news and spoiling a surprise that entire start-up worked for.
- functionform 15y agoCrunchpad anyone? I found him too infrequent to be a major reason to visit the site. I suspect that most of the traffic hit techcrunch thanks to the endless link baiting of MG or popularity contest blather like their Twitter "coverage". Twitter used to be every other feature. Other big winners were Sarah Lacy saying that old media is dead and no one wants to be a journalist at WSJ (how did that turn out btw) or other random bouts of idiocy (RSS is dead!) Frankly, Techcrunch has long been a source of tech trolling. For trolls, by trolls. Its no wonder it went under - the sugar high simply ran out.
- B0Z 15y agoDamn, shingen. I could have written your response word for word. Well said.
- untog 15y agoI'm not too surprised. These days it seems that TechCrunch is little more than a dumping ground for startup press releases, with a slight dose of embellishment around the edges. Still, a new editor may changes things up a lot. At least all of the old blood is gone now. They can try to make a fresh start.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoKinda what Engadget is for gadgets...
- untog 15y agoPretty much. If I want to read gadget news I go to The Verge now. TechCrunch is lucky that no single large competitor is challenging it. Yet.
- w1ntermute 15y agoThe Verge has great content, but damn, does their site design suck. It looks nice enough, but it hangs my browser even on top-of-the-line computers. I usually end up surfing the mobile site (mobile.theverge.com) even on my PCs.
- untog 15y agoReally? It works fine for me. That said, they could do with paginating their comments, or something- take this page for example: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/28/2829143/apple-ipad-3-event-march-7th-official http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/28/2829143/apple-ipad-3-event... full of comments (with images!) that slow down the page load.
- SCdF 15y agoIt's bad on Opera and "OK" on Chrome (checked on Win7 / OSX), but it's definitely noticeable when you close The Verge and go to someone else's site. edit: just checked your link. Urg, they really need to stop people being able to post images, my opinion of the quality of that site just dropped sharply.
- laconian 15y agoI've been pretty astounded by the lack of technical knowledge that TC's writers possess. The coverage now is mostly those meta, "Inside Baseball" kind of stories -- where they aren't talking about the technology, they're talking about the personalities, the stupid feuds, oh and all that insipid Valley navel-gazing...
- funkah 15y agoTechCrunch was always shitty, people are just noticing now.
- pyre 15y agoThis comment could easily be mistaken for a comment made in 2008. I don't think that 'people are just noticing now' is accurate.
- alaskamiller 15y agoThat's what the Valley has always been about. Each year as the industry matures the more Hollywood it gets. 'Tis what happens when many see each other simply as network nodes, to be connected and leveraged.
- smacktoward 15y agoAaaand nothing of value was lost.
- ultimatewarrior 15y agoDon't even care anymore.
- rudiger 15y agoIs PandoDaily the new TechCrunch? I ask because I think a lot of their former staff moved there.
- janlukacs 15y agoIt's really not... every time i go there most of the stories are by Sarah Lacy bashing google. Maybe they'll grow over time. But than again TC is really dead to me. stopped reading it about a year and a half ago.
- laconian 15y agoAs in, it's also garbage? Yes. Look at this shitshow. http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/you-will-not-be-the-next-silicon-valley-please-stop-trying/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/you-will-not-be-the-next-si...
- tatsuke95 15y ago>"Yes, the idyllic town situated between Belfast and Dublin is looking to capitalize on the latest trend: technology" A tech "writer" who thinks that "technology" is some new concept developed in Silicon Valley. Cute. Thanks for reminding me why I haven't checked in on that site.
- laconian 15y agoThe writer is just 18 years old.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- shingen 15y agoI keep visiting Pando about once every week or two, trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. It's terrible. Each week that goes by, the odds that I'll keep returning continue to drop. Maybe with the VC they raised they have some time to figure out a better formula. As it is, they seem to be an even less polished version of TechCrunch (the new mediocre version).
- sssparkkk 15y agoIf I recall correctly, it was a post by Arrington that informed me about the existence of hacker news. Which for me personally directly resulted in a reduction of visits to Techcrunch, and a sharp increase in visits to HN. Anyone else who remembers the post I'm talking about (couldn't find it) and who had a similar experience?
- alanfalcon 15y agoPossibly this one? http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...
- sssparkkk 15y agoYes, that's the one! After reading that post I practically stopped visiting Techcrunch.
- alanfalcon 15y agoI'm curious: there has been a ton of linking from HN to Tech Crunch since then (less so recently, of course) - did you mean you gave up visiting Tech Crunch as a destination or hardly ever even followed links there?
- tatsuke95 15y agoExact same experience. Wandered over here, and haven't looked back. I know that anything Techcrunch puts up that's worthwhile will make its way here.
- joering2 15y agobut HN statistics dont look promising either: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/
- dewitt 15y agoDoes it matter whether HN traffic is going up or down? As far as I can tell, the point of HN isn't to drive pageviews or sell ads, it's to act as a public discussion board for the extended YC family of people with like-minded interests, and maybe a bit of a feeder system / promotion for the fund. If anything, fewer drive-bys mean higher-quality posts and comments, all the better for the regular participants. S/N ratio is rarely improved by more traffic, after all.
- rogerbinns 15y agoDid you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US") http://www.compete.com/us/about/our-data/ http://www.compete.com/us/about/our-data/ Google shows the graph going up over time (and is international): http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com Alexa has a different shape (bump up in 1Q2011 and then slow decline): http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com So three different companies all claiming to have good data with three completely different shapes for the traffic in 2011. It shows just how unreliable the data is. I remember the reddit folks saying just how bad the sites like the above were compared to the actual traffic they were getting (can't be bothered to find the link).
- raldi 15y agohttp://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
- joering2 15y agoI didnt say anything about specific numbers; I just stated fact that the numbers are falling. I agree with you that each monitoring company comes up with totally different numbers. on the top of that, companies do revamp their websites - use more or less ajax, change approach to pinging back theirs servers for updated data, etc, and numbers can go sky-high or plummet and still it won't be a reliable read. but AFAIK this "problem" does not affect rather stable design of HN. > Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US") Again, if I dont look into numbers, but only simple chart, I read it that: representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined. thats it. Now, someone else pointed: does it even matter? It depends who we ask.
- SonicSoul 15y agodo good things ever happen for consumers when AOL or Yahoo buys a startup?
- dscho32 15y agoThe numbers are unconvincing. The argument is: Staff flees leading to plummeting traffic. What we essentially see is one data point (January year-over-year change). At a minimum, I'd like to see what it looks like for each month in the series to even out any anomalies. It's hard for me to judge whether the quality of TechCrunch has indeed gone down, but to point to one month of data and say that traffic plummeted seems a bit of a stretch. I could just as easily point to February year-over-year and say, see, these staff defections haven't had an impact.