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The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- debacle 12y agoMaybe the equation is that TechCrunch articles about startup funding get more "help" from those startups on sites like HN/Reddit, thus they get much more exposure, thus more views. This is an amazing analysis. Thank you. I really enjoyed the aggregated "x for y" headlines.
- minimaxir 12y agoarticle.published_at = Time.zone.parse(elm.css(".byline time").first.to_h["datetime"]) # timezone seems inconsistent, no big deal because we only care about date anyway I've written a TechCrunch scraper myself, and it turns out the reason the time-zone is inconsistent is TechCrunch outputs the time in 12-hour AM/PM...but forgets to include the AM/PM. So the hours just loop around from 0 to 12.
- samcrawford 12y agoI too wrote a little TC scraper a few months back, as a friend's startup was expecting an article there and I wanted to see it first. In the process I found a Wordpress bug that meant unpublished article headlines were leaked. Reported it to TC, no response at all. Reported it to Wordpress via Hackerone, they've fixed it for Wordpress VIP sites, but not in the main codebase yet. That was four months ago, and they've stopped responding to emails now.
- jdbiggs 12y agoWho did you email? I don't see anything. john@techcrunch.com
- 001sky 12y agoFunraising is very envy-inducing. Envy tends to be good for advertisers (look at womens print magazines, if you have any doubt). I'd be interested to see how this impacts their advertising business metrics.
- minimaxir 12y agoFor my TechCrunch scraper, I obtained the number of Facebook shares for each TechCrunch article to use as a proxy for popularity/page views. There appears to be a correlation, as Facebook social media shares of TechCrunch articles have doubled in the same months as the peak of fundraising announcements. http://i.imgur.com/Xqhahjs.png http://i.imgur.com/Xqhahjs.png EDIT: reduced unintentional financial verbiage.
- debacle 12y agoIt took me about five minutes to realize you weren't talking about stocks. For anyone equally confused, minimaxir means "Share this on Facebook" shares.
- nerfhammer 12y agoIn the same months? Can't you just at # of shares post by post and see it it correlates with whether it's a fundraising post?
- minimaxir 12y agoI had the chart+data on hand: doing that analysis would take a little more work.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- VLM 12y agoThere were some astounding financial panics due to railroad overbuilding in that era, that pretty much word for word match the fiber over building in the last dotcom bubble. Also there was some interesting industrial acquisition action in some market verticals that vaguely resembles the present era. I'm not saying Standard Oil is a perfect analogy to Google or other companies that acquire startups, but its certainly not the worst possible historical analogy.
- 001sky 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania Railway Mania was an instance of speculative frenzy in Britain in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, more and more money was poured in by speculators, until the inevitable collapse. It reached its zenith in 1846, when no fewer than 272 Acts of Parliament were passed, setting up new railway companies, and the proposed routes totalled 9,500 miles (15,300 km) of new railway.
- softdev12 12y agoThis is really awesome. It really says something about the quality of the product being churned out at TC. I imagine that most of the funding articles are short. It would be interesting to see how much of the total words were about fundraising (i.e. not just headlines, but the entire article).
- josefresco 12y agoI stopped visiting TechCrunch almost 5 years ago when it changed from highlighting new and upcoming startups to simply covering news of the already established and huge tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook etc. I haven't been back, but do catch an article or two when it's linked from HN. Does anyone here still frequent TC enough to comment on the current editorial direction?
- photorized 12y agoThey have a separate startup section now, but even that's getting repetitive.
- photorized 12y agoI remember doing a very basic analysis (via Google search) of TC headlines back in 2012, but I was curious about their preference for funded companies vs bootstrapped, in terms of coverage. Predictably, they were mostly covering funding rounds: http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2012/07/23/no-coverage-for-self-funded-companies/ http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2012/07/23/no-coverage-for... Your data is very interesting. Any change you could also "group by" company and list companies which are more frequently (repeatedly) covered by TC? I have a theory about that, would be interesting to test.
- logicallee 12y agoThis is pretty good - until you published it. Now all you need to ask is how much incentive TC's owners have to show a certain graph. (That is just one example of gamification this can create.) I mean because they can publish whatever headlines they want and track and hack this graph absolutely directly. I think it would have been better to keep this pretty powerful heuristic for yourself :)
- billclerico 12y agoit's interesting to see a spring surge in headlines & a fall surge in headlines - perhaps a result of the summer slowdown at VC firms.
- jstoiko 12y agoVery interesting. I wonder if any changes in TC editorial line could have biased this graph.
- ultimape 12y agoI'd love to see this done with the new hackernews api.
- randomname2 12y agoThis article indicates startup funding is way down since this spring.