As Staff Flees, TechCrunch’s Traffic Plummets | Hacker News Reader

As Staff Flees, TechCrunch’s Traffic Plummets

paidcontent.org

62 pointsjedwhite41 comments

I'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...

TechCrunch was always shitty, people are just noticing now.

This comment could easily be mistaken for a comment made in 2008. I don't think that 'people are just noticing now' is accurate.

That'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.

I'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.

Kinda what Engadget is for gadgets...

Pretty 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.

The 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.

Really? 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...

full of comments (with images!) that slow down the page load.

It'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.

The Verge is a rag full of SEO spam and reworded news, built by ex-AOLers for AOL to buy again.

Oh thank bahamut someone else said it. Good content, terrible design. Over complicated in every way. It's going for that "lively & chaotic" content all over the place look. You know, the one magazines love to use, the one that people hate to read because it's hard to skim through and forces you to play connect the dots all over the page. I almost need to draw a replica of the front page on paper and mark off which stories I read so I can keep track of where I am.

Yet so many blogs are going for that look. Why? It's pretty but so difficult to read.

It's worth pointing out that The Verge was started by Joshua Topolsky, who was the editor at Engadget until about a year ago.

If 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?

Possibly this one?

http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...

Yes, that's the one! After reading that post I practically stopped visiting Techcrunch.

I'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?

Exact 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.

Aaaand nothing of value was lost.

The 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.

Is PandoDaily the new TechCrunch? I ask because I think a lot of their former staff moved there.

It'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.

As in, it's also garbage? Yes. Look at this shitshow. http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/you-will-not-be-the-next-si...

>"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.

The writer is just 18 years old.

I 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).

PandoDaily is just so meta, every other post is about itself. The only value it provides is to those that care about the writers or "tech drama".

do good things ever happen for consumers when AOL or Yahoo buys a startup?

but HN statistics dont look promising either:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/

Does 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.

Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US")

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

Alexa has a different shape (bump up in 1Q2011 and then slow decline):

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).

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

I 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.

> I just stated fact that the numbers are falling

Except Google says they are climbing and Alexa says they are about the same, and as Raldi pointed in his link for stats of Reddit (a somewhat similar site) the numbers these services report are essentially fiction.

> representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined

According to Quantcast they are climbing (almost 50% increase).

The only people who know the actual traffic figures are the admins. Why not ask them for the real numbers instead of considering one cherry picked report as a fact?

And HN just published their stats showing that your "fact" is complete BS.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669947

AOL'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.

Not that Arrington itself did not have it's problems, though.

Absolutely, 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.

yes, 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.

Crunchpad 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.

Damn, shingen. I could have written your response word for word. Well said.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com