Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I've had it enough with mainstream media who are incompetent when they're not being corrupt.
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.
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QuantumG seems like a guy who is bitter he isn't in the same position.
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.