Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive

Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how advertising in tech media is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs and Google. "Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media, there's blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its offices after getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip site Valleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but about its woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner's Business 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period a year ago; PC Magazine's editor in chief walked out the door after ad pages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouse CNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it covers flourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there's no reason the same thing won't happen, eventually, in every media niche."

Comments

Not blogs, but forums

[m0nkyman]

Anytime I want to research something now, I go to the appropriate forum. There are serious experts available at pretty much all of them. e.g: Want to learn about cellphones: HowardForums.com. Want to find out about military firearms: ar15.com . There's a site for everything.

Blogs are great for some stuff, but forums are just killing the tech magazines, and the special interest stuff.

Re:Not blogs, but forums

[GizmoToy]

I can agree with this. I rarely visit blogs for anything, but will often consult forums for just about everything. Tech support-type stuff is particularly well-suited to the forum/newsgroup format. This is especially true if you have a question you can't find a pre-existing answer for. Just the other day I had a non-trial question about Ruby On Rails, so I went over to RailsForum and had an answer within a few hours. So forums do have specific advantages over both blogs and traditional media.

Perhaps the biggest advantage for blogs over traditional tech magazines would be product reviews, in my opinion. An online reviewer with dozens of user-posted comments is more reliable than a single possibly advertiser-paid reviewer.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had it enough with mainstream media who are incompetent when they're not being corrupt.

This won't decrease the amount of advertising

[Zork the Almighty]

As much as I hate advertising, this is probably a bad sign. Companies won't do less advertising - it works too well, but at least on CNET we know where (most of?) the ads are. Who is sponsoring this or that tech blog? We've already seen "scandals" like that, although blogs are mostly not journalism. It is probably a lot cheaper and effective to buy out a few blogs and get consistent long term shilling than it is to buy recognizable ads on a bigger site. It has consistently been safe to predict that in the future we will be subject to more and more marketing that is more pervasive and less recognizable than ever before. It never seems to end.

The problem is editorial, not structural

[maynard]

The reason these ads are moving to the blogs is because the readership is at the blogs. The reason the readership is there is because bloggers are picking apart opinion pieces throughout the editorial world and reshaping them by arguing against their positions. Thus, readership is fleeing commercial journalism because the commercial rags aren't offering what readers want.

What do readers want? These days, a little fucking truth would help. I think we're all sick of the clear commercial bias inherent in all these supposed tech reviews and bullshit 'secretly sponsored opinion'. The same is happening in professional news. TV and cable news viewership is down. WAY DOWN. Why is that? Because they don't offer news.

When these 'tech journals' hire a few more reporters and start publishing real news, you'll see their readers and advertisers follow right back. Because, frankly, the blog-0-sphere offers no substantial news reporting either.

Re:They waste money on editors

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a matter of editors eating up all their money as it is that that they have a reputation for spanning their articles over 3 or 4 times as many pages as they should in a blatant attempt to get more 'clickthroughs' or 'eyeballs' or whatever they call it. If they used ads responsibly and had legitimate content, maybe people would think twice about either turning off their ad-blocking software or clicking on an ad or two. I know I would.

--
QuantumG seems like a guy who is bitter he isn't in the same position.

It's called RSS.

[Gordo_1]

RSS helps sites by attracting busy people like me who don't have time to surf a dozen sites to find an interesting article. But at the same time it's killing them, because people like me surgically link in to read an article and then close the tab immediately, never so much as considering looking at other features of their site. (It probably doesn't help that I use adblock and overlay all Flash content with control buttons, but that's beside the point.)

I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).

Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.

Re:They waste money on editors

[LWATCDR]

Why Tech sites are failing?
1. The readers of tech sites know how to block ads. Heck I have so many wildcards in my ad blocking software that many times when I go to a new site I don't see any ads.
2. They place ads in such a say as to demand that they are blocked. When they put the ad in the middle of the text that screams BLOCK ME NOW. And while your at it use a wild card. Also any ads that use Flash are also just asking to be blocked. I have to wonder if these people are just clueless or what? The real shame is that in print I value the ads. They are less intrusive and I often seek them out. On the Internet they tend to get into the way. Google ads are the exception.
3. Lack of depth. Back in the good old days of Byte, Micro, Dr Dobbs, and Computer language the articles where great and in depth. Byte has articles on making your own EEG, SBC, and even how to make your own PC. When I mean make your own PC I mean actually making the motherboard not getting the latest form ASUS. Most articles these days are on which Core2Duo motherboard will let you over clock the cpu .5% more then the others or which $600 graphics card will get you 3 more FPS out of Oblivion.
4. Web 2.0 Frankly between my.yahoo, iGoogle, and Slashdot I don't need to read any tech site every day.
5. Bad journalism. This is the real killer. Why can't they stop trying to write flame bait?