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Wait a Moment… Who is the Desperate One?
Last night I read a hit-job post like I haven’t seen since my days on the G in Brooklyn during the 70s. The hit-job I am referring to is Erick Schonfeld’s piece about Matt Marshall joining the DEMO conference team. Apparently because one person (Chris Shipley) decides to change her focus after running the conference for 13 years, they must be "desperate". Erick also makes the following observations, "He is going to have to reinvigorate a dying brand." and "It is fine by us if DEMO sticks to its model of extorting startups". I can’t believe we are still talking about this tc50 vs. demo crap.
Erick uses the post to explain that his conference, Techcrunch50, is the much better model and that now he will have to "crush" VentureBeat. He notes that techcrunch50 companies get in on merit (oh is that how they do it!). Erick also displays a chart displaying the very little traffic that demo.com receives but leaves the techcrunch50.com site out of the chart – the comparison chart is available below for reference.
I wrote an in-person review of both Demo and TC50 from last year as I was one of three people to attend both events. It was great to meet so many CN readers at both events. After the unprofessional treatment I received at TC50, I won’t be attending this year. I am not going to go into the behavior here but suffice to say that even the event staffers thought the behavior was unprofessional.
The truth is that the numerous stories I heard from the entrepreneurs of the demo pit startups, the ones that pay $3k/day, were not good. But, as one might guess, no one wants to speak on-the-record because they are afraid.
It’s totally understandable that the Techcrunch team is probably a little upset because Time magazine ranked their top competitor Mashable as a top blog for 2009 while Techcrunch was listed as "overrated". Might these be some additional reasons why Techcrunch might be the desperate one in this conversation?
- They’ve added a "javascript page refresh" – this means that if you leave the site open in a tab, it will refresh every once in a while – extra pageviews for the site
- They continue to increase the page views required to read the comments – first it was 100 on a page and a link to "view all comments" – now that link is gone and less comments are viewable on each page
- They have decided to break embargoes when it suits them to make sure they appear first
- Even with their reportedly strong-arm tactics, startups are starting to provide news to everyone but Techcrunch and as I’ve said since the early days the best route is to provide the news to all of the sites you trust to honor the posting time and get the most coverage and feedback you can.
Patricio Robles from eConsultancy has a good post reviewing the same post. He talks about why positivity sells; I guess he doesn’t read the aformentioned blog often. Let’s hope that Erick thinks about all the negative feedback on his post and offers up an apology to Matt and Chris, even if it’s handled privately.
please never say gilmor’s name around here – he runs TCIT – "Techcrunch is Twitter" – you thought it was an enterprise site :) i could go on – but his amazing quality podcast says it all
No idea if that was really Erick but:
“We all need pageviews, but that is not the reason we refresh or show fewer comments. It is to speed up page load times.”
Refreshing does not speed up load times, if that was truly a concern.
“We often get more than 100 comments on a post, and it can take forever to load.”
There’s no reason for comments to get blamed, that’s ridiculous. The HTML of a page with over 100 comments is on the order of 128K..The actual comment data (name, time, comment) presented in a full page of comments is about 16K. That’s 1/8 of the total. But lets say all the HTML is necessary and it’s totally optimized. We’ll charitably call comments half. The page is gzipped, so that takes up about 12K total of 24K. Hell call it 100%, 24K.
That leaves aside the absolute avalanche of widgets and Javascript loads that go on at TC. Page Info in Mozilla shows over 100 files being loaded in the page. Over 600K of material. Versus 25K for the HTML. The comments are nothing.
Yeah, it can definitely take forever. That’s why I hardly visit– that and Steve Gillmor. But it has nothing to do with the amount of comments. And refreshing has never sped up the initial display of a page. Your comments make no sense.
It is much, much more believable, since your advertising page quotes pageviews per month next to the rates (http://www.techcrunch.com/advertise/), that that is the precise purpose of splitting comments and adding refresh. Get a better story before you try to sell it, it’s weak sauce.
Leave Eric alone! He has a new baby Sesame to support so he needs more pageviews – diapers ain’t cheap yo.
Thank you, Maggie. We all need pageviews, but that is not the reason we refresh or show fewer comments. It is to speed up page load times. we often get more than 100 comments on a post, and it can take forever to load. Maybe Allen doesn’t have that problem.
Allen, you are welcome to come back to TC50 anytime. I’m not aware of how you were “mistreated,” but we welcome any feedback. The only thing I recall from your review was that you were complaining about the chairs.
As to the “hit job” I make no bones about wearing my bias on my sleeves in that post. I simply think TC50 is a better conference. But take out the sentence about us crushing DEMO and there really isn’t much I said that wasn’t reported elsewhere. Believe me, if DEMO was doing well, Shipley would not be out the door.
And, Allen, your chart there would be more accurate if you compared demo.com vs. venturebeat.com vs. techcrunch.com. Not techcrunch50.com. That is just an informational site used during the confernces. Our community gathers at the main site.
this is even better chart lol
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=venturebeat.com,+techcrunch.com,+demo.com,+techcrunch50.com,+centernetworks.com&sa=N
Everyone wants to take a shot at the 800 lb gorrilla. Looking at TC’s page views and RSS subs, I think there is a clear case that negativity also “sells” though it will not be done without the town-criers weighing in on the issue.
I could bash TC fairly easily, but I think it is more than just a blog, and Crunchbase is a very good resource; TC is in a good position.. Of course, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it is obvious that you do.
And, the idea that Mashable has anything on TC is simply hilarious.
Hi Coldbew – thanks for your comment. You are right – tc is the master of the "pageview via controversial and negativity postings"
As for dog in the fight – I have no dog in the fight – if I wanted to be in that club, I would do it and do it well. I am very happy where CN is.
Thanks for stopping by Erick – I will reply to each of your items below:
Thank you, Maggie. We all need pageviews, but that is not the reason we refresh or show fewer comments. It is to speed up page load times. we often get more than 100 comments on a post, and it can take forever to load. Maybe Allen doesn’t have that problem.
– Yep, I don’t have that problem.
Allen, you are welcome to come back to TC50 anytime. I’m not aware of how you were "mistreated," but we welcome any feedback. The only thing I recall from your review was that you were complaining about the chairs.
– I left the rest out because I don’t care to play the silly games but it’s all documented.
As to the "hit job" I make no bones about wearing my bias on my sleeves in that post. I simply think TC50 is a better conference. But take out the sentence about us crushing DEMO and there really isn’t much I said that wasn’t reported elsewhere. Believe me, if DEMO was doing well, Shipley would not be out the door.
– There was no reason for you to post in that case. And considering there were more people at DEMO than TC50, I am not sure they are doing as poorly as you try to always make out. Either way, if you read the commentary from around the web, it just wasn’t a healthy post.
And, Allen, your chart there would be more accurate if you compared demo.com vs. venturebeat.com vs. techcrunch.com. Not techcrunch50.com. That is just an informational site used during the confernces. Our community gathers at the main site.
– your chart put up demo.com to show how little traffic they have – I merely added your conference site to make the comparison more fair.
Erick. You are ridiculous. That is all there is to it.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for the crappy grammar and punctuation.
Anyway, I think you do have a dog in this race, and you have taken up with the anti-TC cabal (I could easily name names here). As a blog in the tech space, you compete for scoops, Techmeme, pageviews, $ etc.
I like what you do here at CN, but I like to be as objective as possible which is directly related to my not knowing anyone, and being a complete unknown.
heh – trust me i don’t compete for pageviews, techmeme or scoops – i turn down exclusives nearly every other day – because i stand firm that getting as much coverage as possible is best – and trust me – if your news is good, techcrunch will still cover you
Techcrunch make a living from being abusive – it’s their ‘thing.’
Look at the crap and ‘daily threats’ Michael Arrington was crying about a few weeks ago, when someone spat in his face.
This is just another example of them trying to shock. It’s crap.
Wait, Chris Shipley is female?
The TC50 conference last year was the most disorganized goat rodeo I have ever attended. The production values were abysmal – the physical setting was more cold storage facility than quality launch venue, if you weren’t in the first 20 rows you couldn’t see anything, the sound quality was poor, the conference schedule itself was only loosely adhered to, and the judging format was changed mid stream. The decision on which company was the “best” (Yammer) was laughable. I was with one of the annointed companies, and the complete absence of organization was baffling – would we or would we not have a place to set up after our demo so that interested parties could find us?
And while the TC50 companies may not have been charged, the poor schmucks in the hall who were paying ~ $3K each for a small tabletop got no value beyond being able to distribute their free tee shirts.
What I find most ironic is TC50’s strict admonition that we were not to tell anyone that we were debuting – no press interviews, no releases, nothing until we were on stage near the half way point of the conference. The stated objective was “we want to preserve the news value of you being on stage”. Ummm. Isn’t that called an embargo?
your comment is similar to the ones I heard over and over during the event – especially from the demo pit companies – it’s too bad none of them will step forward publicly – it would help more companies think about it for this year.
Excellent post Allen. I was going to write something similar, but you did a better job.
Re: Eric’s response:
The endless arrogance of TechCrunch in general is despicable. This last post by them left me floored. I have seen some off kilter writing before, but that post was beyond anything.
Keep writing, Allen, we need you.
-Alex
thanks alex
Hey Allen,
I think Erick has this tendency to jump the gun on things, personally they need to stop bickering.
If start ups are willing to pay 20,000 to get up on stage and present there product, so be it. Some very successful companies have come out of it.
I think that they should *focus* on the start ups and not on themselves… without the start ups neither of them would exist. DEMO and TC50 in my opinion are both great ways to promote your brand and company and I think that choosing between either/or is just dumb on everyone’s part.
As for Erick, your bias is astronomical. Calm down… lets the start ups have an option. Great companies are coming out of both TC50 and DEMO, something no one should be arguing with. As for there change of plans, big whoop. Times change, and just because they had to adjust some things does not mean there failing. A broad assumption that contains no evidence from you.
Also, comparing demo.com to techcrunch.com is really unfair. They serve two very separate purposes and comparing techcrunch50.com to demo.com is much more of a fair comparison.
You talk about the start ups but honestly I don’t see you caring about start ups. I just see Twitter and Facebook now a days. This could just be me and my narrowed teenage mind who knows.
Long live the start up.