We know that earth does wobble. Occasionally it also undergoes polarity reversals. But such events are rare. What is more common is the rise and fall of Internet giants. Common is panic, finger-pointing and lawsuits. Common is plummeting traffic and management ousters. It happened to Altavista, it happened to Myspace, it happened to Yahoo and it might happen to Google too. But Techcrunch? Never thought that it could happen to TC, did you?
No way there doesn’t seem any good reason for us to think that TC would fall off the precipice anytime soon. That tech readers would move away from it is, DEFINITELY IS, a far flung imagination. Except for the effect that AOL (and its IE loving readers) has on TC community, or may be too many Apple love posts is finally taking a toll on TC’s readership. Or may be there was genuine disliking for Paul Carr’s anti-Assange essays, who knows?
Techcrunch is wobbling these days. I got to be kidding you, but Alexa does not lie.
There is a clear sharp fall in traffic in the last couple of weeks. What is more interesting is that the dip is happening after the new year holidays are over and every other website seems to be picking up the numbers. It could so happen that TC community is off for longer holiday on Tahiti, coz you know CEO & VCs generally have lots of fun. But hey did you observe that Engagdet faced such a dip in traffic last month and they bought ad space too?
And this is what Michael Arrington got to say about it. “One thing big blogs don’t do is buy traffic to juice up the Comscore numbers. It’s an unspoken rule. It’s cheating, and it brings in bad traffic that doesn’t stick around or come back for the most part (or so we assume).
So we’re sad to see our sister blog Engadget doing just that – buying ads to pump up their Comscore rankings. We’ve seen a ridiculous number of ads on Google over the last month or two saying things like “Keep Up With What’s Going On In The Tech World With News From Engadget.”
And here, that‘s how Engadget fairs on Alexa:
Engadget did resort to buying ad space to spruce up its number but Techcrunch, by looking at its recent post on Engadget, will probably not do it.
So the question is are people ultimately choosing to move away from Techcrunch? If so, what could be the reason for it? Is AOL aura (common between Engadget and Techcrunch) a reason behind the fall or the writing quality is deteriorating? My opinion – AOL.
What’s your take?
yeah, I second that, AOL should be the primary reason.
Well, actually, it’s a cumulative effect of the factors you have mentioned: Apple-frenzy, quora-quora; other no-news articles – just go on to show that quantity is more important than quality at TC – still it does remain as one of the first-news source for me
Lately, TC has taken a too crunchy path, too crunchy to remain relevant.
Be it about Quora or Apple (workship) or Yahoo bashing, I think they are too much into ‘How can I ignite a debate now’, with no impact on tomorrow.
I don’t think I have read more than 10 TC articles that I keep for ‘Read Later’ [except Vivek Wadhwa and few other guest author's].
Quantity vs. Quality – and that’s why I have started reading more of gigaom and subscribed to a few meta aggregators (that anyway pull the newsy stuff reported by TC).
I agree about the rumor mongering TC does – and the effect of the same.
AOL taking over hopefully should not have major effects on editorial standards – MikeArr would be taking care of that aspect atleast :)
Hope pluggdin’s traffic is as loyal as ever though.. :-)
@Rithish – Yep! It is. Our challenge is to live up to reader’s expectation.
Very soon, we will move away from newsy items and focus a lot more on ‘things that matter’, and launch our angelconnect platform as well.
Stay ‘Pluggd.in’ [oops! sorry for the cliche'! :)]
Thanks Ashish. The flurrry of artsy and newsie items did cause a bit of alarm, its easy to get lost and lose loyalty in all the link-baiting jazz.
Ha ha! Great post, is this a sign of tech epicenter moving away from west coast?
I took TC off my reader sometime last month. I saw that there were always several unread items from TC in my Google Reader, and I just lost interest in the “opinions” of the various authors there.
I never really pondered on why I lost interest, but I do recall a time when I enjoyed their posts. Lately, it’s been all fluff – a lot of it ill mannered – like when Paul Carr I think it was who wrote a post insulting commenters.
Well said Manshu!
Quora has a role to play. The quality of content around startups there is very precise, succinct and authentic. I’d rather hang out on Quora than read fanboy posts and/or silly flame-war rants.
Why did you bring Quora in between? Fear of hyperbolism?
Nice!
This just in: http://joshuatopolsky.tumblr.com/post/2791763076/dear-michael-arrington
Looks like TC & Engadget are engaged, lasers pointing to each other!
- Arvind
TC is dead. Long live TC.
Troll in the open?
Well, I believe there’s something called “Too Many Posts”. I’m limited my visits to TC because I see so many posts that may not be relevant to me. Maybe TC could get its readers back by slowing down a bit and posting only about what ‘matters’.
PS: Too much of Quora on TC these days. Don’t know why they do it.
enGADGET is more consumer oriented.
Known bloated, blowhard, blowing up vs Mr (Who?) from the now plainer than vanilla sales brochure pictures of an gadget.
Both look like some kind of press release.
Do not care.
Better:
The Laporte nuke:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsV-lgnAjps&feature=player_embedded
I am not clicking any more links to this boring bash
by these two boring sites until they start doing proper videos.
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TC post have been mediocre at best for many months now. I used to love TC but I no longer read any of their post. In fact after reading this post I visited TC after nearly a month, to just find same kind of post.
They need to go back to their roots and focus on startups, all kind of startups (not just Apple, Quora, iphone apps)
Just realised the number of Feed subscribers for TC has gone down from 4Mn+ to ~2Mn in past 30 days. People who went for Christmas didn’t seem to come back.
Here’s a silly reason – People got a new PC on Xmas. New browser installation was done and they did not remember to bookmark TC. :)