Basically, its just the Prisoners Dilema (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma), with fairly larg

Basically, its just the Prisoners Dilema (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma), with fairly large impact on outside sources based on the decision. It seems to look like: TechCrunch Breaks Embargo: Good for them: Spike to traffic. Bad for competitors: lose lots of traffic, everyone already saw it. Bad for entity putting out embargo: it was there for a reason, whatever it was. (?) for users: Unknown how this plays out for the user. It depends largely on the quality of TechCrunch's reporting versus other sites'. TechCrunch does not break Embargo, another site does: Bad for TechCrunch: they get the downplayed traffic, but will still get a good chunk of it due to their size. Good for site that broke embargo: They get the spike, and walk off with a huge traffic spike. Bad for the rest of the competitors: they're still in the same case as everyone else. (?) for users, still. No one breaks embargo: Business as usual for TechCrunch: Apparently they have the largest tech readership. They keep that when it comes to new stuff. Business as usual for the other sites. They get the same traffic proportion as usual, possibly modified if anyone has a particularly interesting take on the product. Good for the user: they get all the views at once, and get to make their own decision. As far as I can tell, no embargoes fits with the last one fairly well, except the coverage will be spotty and the user loses out, because only sites currently staffed at the time the product comes out will be able to post about it, and they'll be rushing out as many updates as possible to grab traffic.