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.)
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.
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.
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.)