Why CNET Is In The Mess They Are In

There has been a good bit of conversation over the past week regarding CNET and the financial issues they are facing. I don't cover stocks on CN so we will leave that discussion on the side, but I'd like to take a look at why I believe Cnet isn't where it could be in terms of revenue, customer satisfaction or traffic. We are only going to look at the CNET blogging empire in this exercise, not the downloads or other portions of CNET.

The first reason is way too much decentralization. From what I can tell, CNET has three main properties: CNET, ZDNet, TechRepublic and Bnet. We will leave Bnet out of this discussion. I started putting an overall site structure map together but gave up as it's just way too confusing. Each of the three sites mentioned overlap each other in some form and it becomes an issue for the consumer.

CNET has what appears to be 100+ bloggers all over the place. It's impossible to follow a single blogger. Two of my favorites are Rafe Needleman and Caroline McCarthy. Both blog in multiple places on the CNET properties and there's no way to grab a feed of a specific author. Rafe mainly blogs on Webware, but also blogs on CNET News (and maybe other places!). Caroline blogs on CNET News, Webware, The Social and potentially others that I don't know about. How many posts from Caroline/Rafe am I missing because they are on another CNET property that I don't follow?

It would be easy to say that all news is published on news.com, but I've seen plenty of news items on the other CNET blogs. For those who only follow news.com, how many items a day are they missing?

Now let's take a look at ZDNet and their mass of bloggers. There appears to be approximately 40 bloggers in the network. Should these bloggers be closer affiliated with the bloggers on CNET, Webware, etc. that cover the same topics? I suggest the answer is yes. Here's an example: Janice Chen blogs about gadgets, why isn't she on Crave? I enjoy reading Steve O'Hear's social posts... should these be on Webware? I could go on.

Here's a list of the blogs on TechRepublic - about 30 or so in total. These blogs tend to focus more on the development and business side so perhaps this could become a category in the new blogging network for CNET.

Why would CNET resist a change? Everyone fears change and CNET (I am assuming) fears lose of pageviews and thereby revenue (either that or they just ignore it). I believe the opposite is true. By creating a new hierarchy, they would increase pageviews and therefore revenue. Customers would be able to subscribe to a blogger of their choosing, blogs would be in silos that make sense and searching would find items across all blogs and the interface for customer interaction would be consistent. I went through an exercise just like this in 1998 when I merged 32 branded Web sites into one corporate site. The brand managers were against it and it took a huge amount of selling to make it happen but in the end it increased sales, customer experience and reduced the development time by a large sum.

Mike Arrington believes that TechCrunch is bigger than CNET in terms of page views but with the massive decentralization that CNET employs, it's nearly impossible to find an accurate count of total traffic so the comparison is an unfair one.

I am by no means suggesting that CNET reduce its writing staff. What I am suggesting is that they get out their whiteboard and think about how their blogging network should be organized and ignore how it is currently organized. It's the most difficult thing to do inside of a business, but by creatively destroying the current properties, the CNET network could rise again as the leader of the pack.

What are your thoughts? Do you read any of the CNET blogs? If so, which ones and do you find the CNET network to be as confusing as I do?