
Entrepreneurs: We Will Happily Respect Your Embargoes - danw
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_will_respect_your_embargoes.php
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jerf
I will say that it is frustrating to see the "race" aspect to tech news. A
concrete example: I was recently trying to decide whether to get a Roku
streaming box to hook to my TV to stream Netflix. This is now old news; it's
been out for months. I was looking for reviews.

The vast majority of news I got was "It's released! Looks good!", with hardly
any more details, and even the "in-depth reviews" done by bloggers were
clearly "I downloaded a movie and starting blathering on". I think I found a
grand total of one review that came from someone actually living with it from
some period of time, vs. tens of people racing to be the first to say
something.

And for what? All the "firsts" put out the same content-free "reviews" within
24 hours of each other. Big whoop. Meanwhile, I _still_ pretty much had to
just order one and figure out whether I wanted one.

(My mini-review: Well done and competently-executed, but for $100 it's only
worth while if you have _no_ other useful way to get video from your laptop to
your TV and you really need the video on your TV, and you find the Netflix
selection OK, which is as thin as people say it is, although there's good
stuff on it and it's a great way to branch out to things you've wanted to try
but didn't want to spend money on. I'm sending the box back, keeping Netflix.)

~~~
brandnewlow
Blame Google and the structure of online advertising.

You need pageviews to make money.

You need google referrals to get pageviews.

Google rewards being the first to cover something.

~~~
pedalpete
I slightly disagree with this unless the majority of users are using google
news as their news source (in which case TC doesn't appear on the front-page
right now at all).

I would think that building a loyal following is more valuable than one-time
hits on news.

I'd like to see the stats on what percent of TC or RRW visits come from google
vs return visits vs HN/Reddit/Digg/etc.

~~~
brandnewlow
Good point.

Let me explain what I base that thinking on.

I met with the publisher of a tech news site about 5 months ago to ask for
advice on building an online only news source. According to quantcast, his
site's U.S. audience is about 2/3 that of Techcrunch, so while not the biggest
site around, it's pretty big. Each of their posts gets 30-40 comments, similar
to Techcrunch's discussion rate.

Anyway I asked this guy some questions about where he gets traffic.

Google News.

I asked where else.

Google News and google search.

He told me fully 70% of their visitors came from Google search or Google news.
Now, these might not be the people commenting on the site every day. But
they're the people accounting for 70% of his revenue.

So that's what my calculation is based on. His site could be an outlier, but I
don't really see why that'd be.

Google reigns supreme in the publishing world.

