Techcrunch vs. Mashable - The News Networks 2.0 - Techcrunch losing ground?
Bubble or not, someone is definitely making money with Web 2.0. And as it is with stock brockers who make money if the markets go up or down, the lawyers who make money whether economy is good or bad, Michael Arrington and Pete Cashmore belong to the winners.
A couple of months ago it was rumored that Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch makes around 120′000 $ a month. Someone close to Techcrunch told me it’s a whole lot more now. It must be, since they can afford to hire a full-blown Harvard MBA CEO and a couple of analysts/researchers.
But smart entrepreneur Michael Arrington is not resting on his highly successful blog. He since launched a uk, french and japanese version of techcrunch with it’s own editors. He also added crunchgear (a blog focusing on media gadgets) and crunchboard (a site to list Web 2.0 jobs for 200$) to his portfolio, slowly but certainly forming some sort of network, comparable to big media companies like Axel Springer in the printing world.
Recent additions include Techcrunch 20, a huge Web 2.0 conference and crunchbase, an attempt to profile all the web 2.0 companies in one database. Posts on Techcrunch no longer link to the company website, but to crunchbases entry of that company.
Techcrunch’s biggest competitor is Mashable, a blog focusing exclusively on social networks (as opposed to anything Web 2.0 on Techcrunch) and edited by UK-based Pete Cashmore.
Mashable also has it’s french version and has recently added a social network to it’s blog.
Taking a look at the Alexa numbers we can see that Mashable is gaining terrain, very quickly:
Compete even tells us mashable has overtaken(!) Techcrunch in reach. These numbers are only valid for US visitors though, but certainly indicate a clear trend!
There are a couple of elements that differ with Mashable from Techcrunch:
Mashable, for example, is clearly inviting users to submit their news stories. whereas Techcrunch makes it quite an effort to contact them.
While it seems easier to get on mashable, it might soon also get you more attention than being techcrunched. On the other hand, being techcrunched always has something more prestigious to it.
In a time where TV and Print Networks are losing consumer attention to the internet, Online Networks with relevant (long-tail) and up-to-date stories will become more and more important. And user clicks mean advertising dollars.
It’s clear that both Pete and Michael first started their blog as a hobby, but have since turned them into real companies with several employees each. Other people write for them and they have successfully leveraged their brand, they can now enjoy smart analysts blogging for them while having a nice share of the ads income of their site. Well done!