3 ms·

Blame Google and the structure of online advertising. You need pageviews to make money. You need google referrals to get pageviews. Google rewards being the

• pedalpete 18y ago
  I slightly disagree with this unless the majority of users are using google news as their news source (in which case TC doesn't appear on the front-page right now at all). I would think that building a loyal following is more valuable than one-time hits on news. I'd like to see the stats on what percent of TC or RRW visits come from google vs return visits vs HN/Reddit/Digg/etc.
  • brandnewlow 18y ago
    Good point. Let me explain what I base that thinking on. I met with the publisher of a tech news site about 5 months ago to ask for advice on building an online only news source. According to quantcast, his site's U.S. audience is about 2/3 that of Techcrunch, so while not the biggest site around, it's pretty big. Each of their posts gets 30-40 comments, similar to Techcrunch's discussion rate. Anyway I asked this guy some questions about where he gets traffic. Google News. I asked where else. Google News and google search. He told me fully 70% of their visitors came from Google search or Google news. Now, these might not be the people commenting on the site every day. But they're the people accounting for 70% of his revenue. So that's what my calculation is based on. His site could be an outlier, but I don't really see why that'd be. Google reigns supreme in the publishing world.