We know that earth does wobble. Occasionally it also undergoes polarity reversals. But such events are rare. What is more common is the rise and fall of Internet giants. Common is panic, finger-pointing and lawsuits. Common is plummeting traffic and management ousters. It happened to Altavista, it happened to Myspace, it happened to Yahoo and it might happen to Google too. But Techcrunch? Never thought that it could happen to TC, did you?
No way there doesn’t seem any good reason for us to think that TC would fall off the precipice anytime soon. That tech readers would move away from it is, DEFINITELY IS, a far flung imagination. Except for the effect that AOL (and its IE loving readers) has on TC community, or may be too many Apple love posts is finally taking a toll on TC’s readership. Or may be there was genuine disliking for Paul Carr’s anti-Assange essays, who knows?
Techcrunch is wobbling these days. I got to be kidding you, but Alexa does not lie.
There is a clear sharp fall in traffic in the last couple of weeks. What is more interesting is that the dip is happening after the new year holidays are over and every other website seems to be picking up the numbers. It could so happen that TC community is off for longer holiday on Tahiti, coz you know CEO & VCs generally have lots of fun. But hey did you observe that Engagdet faced such a dip in traffic last month and they bought ad space too?
And this is what Michael Arrington got to say about it. “One thing big blogs don’t do is buy traffic to juice up the Comscore numbers. It’s an unspoken rule. It’s cheating, and it brings in bad traffic that doesn’t stick around or come back for the most part (or so we assume).
So we’re sad to see our sister blog Engadget doing just that – buying ads to pump up their Comscore rankings. We’ve seen a ridiculous number of ads on Google over the last month or two saying things like “Keep Up With What’s Going On In The Tech World With News From Engadget.”
And here, that‘s how Engadget fairs on Alexa:
Engadget did resort to buying ad space to spruce up its number but Techcrunch, by looking at its recent post on Engadget, will probably not do it.
So the question is are people ultimately choosing to move away from Techcrunch? If so, what could be the reason for it? Is AOL aura (common between Engadget and Techcrunch) a reason behind the fall or the writing quality is deteriorating? My opinion – AOL.
What’s your take?
