AnandTech Acquired by Purch | Hacker News Reader

AnandTech Acquired by Purch

anandtech.com

107 pointsuptown27 comments

Hmm, bought by the same folks who bought Tom's hardware. So does anyone else think that Purch could buy Dr Dobbs and turn themselves into the online equivalent of Byte or PC World from the 90s?

When I saw the headline I thought "Oh no, someone bought AnandTech. It is probably going to become a slow annoying popup ad site like Tom's Hardware." Now I learn that is exactly what is going to happen.

Adblock

Adblock doesn't help with the layout and navigation of Tom's though, which seems to have no logical basis, unless you consider the entire goal of the site to be filtering users into ads.

Won't help you on iOS.

Incidentally, it feels these days like half of the websites I open in TweetBot's WebView break completely, usually due to a delayed pop-up ad. It's the dumbest trend, which, at best, only works on desktop.

Well, then buy a phone which doesn't take away your freedom

Do you really want to do this?

Why not, what do you mean?

If you buy an Android phone you can use Firefox with adblock [1] and the ads are gone.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/adblock-edge/...

Why does this firm have to grow?

From the story, ''AnandTech has been profitable since its inception; it’s been on a great growth curve these past couple of years and we’ve always been able to do more with less, but lately there’s been an increased investment in high quality content.''

Additionally, ''...they [Purch] have a sustainable business model, are profitable and have the sort of reach AnandTech needs to really hit the next level.''

If the business is profitable and has been from its inception, it could be possible investors have had a sizeable return on investment. If this is the case and earnings are steady, it's a large risk to transfer ownership to a new stakeholder for the sake of 'growth'. For example, new ownership and more users may alienate the existing, profitable userbase.

However some web businesses may require 'user growth' as a minimum industry requirement to stay alive.

Anand has left to work at Apple. How could he hold onto ownership without everyone and their dog bringing up the obvious conflict of interest every time the site gave a good review to Apple or a bad review to one of Apple's competitors? I've already seen people complaining about it on places like Reddit.

This seems like the most plausible reason. I'm curious why he didn't sell it off before he left to work at Apple. Perhaps he didn't have the deal ready yet.

Nothing wrong with exiting. It's dangerous to start a business with the intention of never exiting.

Sometimes you just want to move on to better/bigger things.

Everyone wants an high dollar exit? That's my first thought.

if there's one thing i'll remember Anand and AnandTech for, it'll be one of the biggest driving forces behind the SSD revolution. i feel like his initial article started the ball rolling and we've all been better off as a result.

Anandtech will no longer be associated with dailytech, which is possibly the best news I've read all year. That site makes me shake my head so hard my neck hurts.

Tom's Hardware is a garbage website now. Anandtech was much better. Now that the Anandtech podcast doesn't exist anymore, I have nowhere to go for my hype-free hardware newscast.

http://pcper.com/podcast

Techreport.com has a great podcast (and website in general).

Hype-free hardware podcast? Are you kidding me? There was no Anandtech podcast where Anand wouldn't hype up Intel's chips. Been hearing him for a year and half how "Haswell chips will own tablets" or something - before Haswell was out that is.

Anand should have just shut it down before leaving...

They will most likely value the vision and concept of Anand, otherwise he would not have agreed to sell. He's not actively running it anymore, so it makes sense. The guy worked on it for 15 years and brought it up from nothing, well deserved imo.

Can you elaborate?

Deleted comment

He was the driving force behind the site's quality. If you listened to the podcasts he did, it was obvious that he wasn't satisfied with anything less than perfection (in product review analysis).

Without him, at least to me, the site's value has declined significantly.

Well, some founders manage to create a lasting culture, in some places the culture flounders but rebounds, and in others the whole thing goes down the drain of "maximizing value" after the founder exits.

E.g. (while on a different scale and business area) Disney once more makes nice movies event though they went through a season of craptasia.

I have no idea what the situation is with Anandtech though.

And being that he's a perfectionist, do you think he'd be fine with hiring people that cut corners?

Exactly. He didn't leave that long ago, which makes this purchase just salt in the wound for the faithful readers. The fans of Anandtech loved the quality, not quantity of the articles.

Wow, glad I got downvoted 17 fucking times for my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com