
As Staff Flees, TechCrunch’s Traffic Plummets - jedwhite
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-as-staff-flees-techcrunch-traffic-plummets/
======
laconian
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...

~~~
funkah
TechCrunch was always shitty, people are just noticing now.

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

------
untog
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.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Kinda what Engadget is for gadgets...

~~~
untog
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.

~~~
w1ntermute
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.

~~~
untog
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...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/28/2829143/apple-ipad-3-event-
march-7th-official)

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

~~~
SCdF
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.

------
sssparkkk
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?

~~~
alanfalcon
Possibly this one?

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-
is...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-
read-every-morning/)

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

~~~
alanfalcon
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?

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smacktoward
Aaaand nothing of value was lost.

------
dscho32
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.

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

~~~
laconian
As in, it's also garbage? Yes. Look at this shitshow.
[http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/you-will-not-be-the-next-
si...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/you-will-not-be-the-next-silicon-
valley-please-stop-trying/)

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"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.

~~~
laconian
The writer is just 18 years old.

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

------
joering2
but HN statistics dont look promising either:

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

~~~
rogerbinns
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).

~~~
joering2
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.

~~~
rogerbinns
> 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?

------
shingen
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.

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

~~~
shingen
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.

~~~
joering2
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.

