Thursday, June 03, 2010

The Mashable Success Story

Image representing Mashable as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase
Mashable has been a remarkable success story in blogging. Pete Cashmore started it when he was 19. He started it in his bedroom in Scotland where he is from. By now it gets more page hits then the top tech blog TechCrunch. That has been true for months. Mashable has a more well defined niche than TechCrunch, and it is more focused on the user.

Switching from being a one person blog to a team blog must have been a major milestone for Mashable. The fact that Mashable has no plans to be sold - "Everyone has a price, but ours is a really high" - should tell you the blog has serious plans to keep digging in its niche. Getting sold to a bigger name company might only blunt that one edge the blog has, that it is your ultimate social media guide. Why not just keep building the traffic, and keep adding to the content, and keep charging more for the ads, right?

The Facebook founder was also 19 when he launched Facebook.

Mashable Did It
Facebook And Mashable: Social Media And Social Media Blog
2010 Trends: Pete Cashmore's Take

TechCrunch Vs. Mashable: There's No Competition Mashable is more about internet culture than pure tech news these days..... if there's a hot celebrity story trending on Twitter they'll find a way of covering it to reap the search engine traffic, if there's a viral video doing well they'll embed it to get the retweets.
AOL In Talks To Acquire Mashable -- Reports AOL is trying to transition from an ISP to a next-generation media company. .... It already has 80 or so independently branded blogs and is planning to grow to more than 100.
The Man Behind Mashable He's been crowned the king of Twitter and is one of the most influential figures in the technology industry. ..... Since setting up Mashable in 2005, while working as a web technology consultant, Cashmore has divided his time between his home town of Aberdeen and the bright lights of Silicon Valley. He's been in Scotland since October, and won't return to the US until January, relying on his team of 15 full-time bloggers and 50 regular contributors to help him keep on top of the key stories.
Mashable’s Identity Crisis They’ve reached that point of critical mass that most bloggers only dream of. The last I heard they had suprassed 20 million page views a month ...... a few months ago Mashable made BIG NEWS by announcing they were going to be hiring real, actual journalists .... some kind of direction shift for Mashable and that they were now interested in serious reportage and investigative journalism ....... s sensationalist and often pedantic blogging ..... Right now it is on track to be the People Magazine of social media. ..... they are interested more in acting like a tabloid.
So What Do You Do, Pete Cashmore, Mashable Founder and CEO? not yet 25. ..... Founding the site was pretty much his first job, as he worked as a Web consultant for a short time beforehand. The site's mission is to be "the social media guide" and cover all things social media. ...... starting Mashable in 2006 from his bedroom in Scotland. He was 19 at the time. ....... I just was really passionate about the space, and wanted to get involved, and I felt like social networking wasn't being covered to the degree it could be. ....... It was personal interest. I didn't necessarily know there was an audience for it. ...... In 2006, we did our first ad deal. It was only a few thousand per month, but it kind of legitimized blogging as a business. Selling a first ad legitimized that this may go somewhere -- this may actually work. ....... When you compare [Mashable] to old school tech magazines, we certainly say we're more focused on the user and the utility for users. For example, we don't cover things like funding announcements. We focus on the user. ...... there is value in both original reporting and curation ...... They're going to cover what they're going to cover. It's up to them. ...... There is no point in writing like the pyramid anymore. You have to write the story in three paragraphs. ..... They need to become both sources of news and curators of community-sourced news. ..... Content is not a scarce resource; attention is a scarce resource. If you put [up] barriers, they will go elsewhere. In the vast majority of cases, a pay wall is a hindrance. We should be focusing on how we [can] make ad models that are more engaging rather than push readers to other sites. ....... We're in a niche where we feel we're leading.
History Of Pete Cashmore's Mashable.com
Mashable Lost its Visitors after the 2010 Redesign Techcrunch now has more unique visitors than Mashable. Techcrunch also seems to have grown ‘only’ +35.54% since last year where Mashable has grown +29.00%. ..... Pete Cashmore’s ‘little’ start-up blog Mashable first overtook the might of Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch back in May 2009 ..... Its Change of pure tech news into tech news + Celebrity news

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Reshma 2010, Square, And Pro.Act.Ly


Reshma Saujani, running for New York City's 14 Congressional District talks to The Next Web from Chad Cat on Vimeo.

Reshma Saujani At The Huffington Post
An Afternoon At The Reshma 2010 Headquarters
A 14-7 Office For Reshma 2010
My Political Resume, Reshma 2010, And September 14
Reshma Saujani, Carolyn Maloney
My Talk With Kevin Lawler Of Reshma 2010
Reshma 2010 Get Together In Little India
Reshma Saujani Ad Spotted At The New York Times Website
Reshma Saujani, Scott Heiferman, Chris Hughes: TechCrunch Disrupt
Reshma Saujani, Haiti Earthquake, Harvard Yale, And 2016
Reshma Saujani "Gets" Tech
Reshma Saujani: Innovation, Ethnic Pride, Thought Leadership

Reshma 2010 has been on the forefront of technological innovation. Reshma 2010 has been the first campaign in America to use Square, Jack Dorsey's revolutionary new product. More people are going to use Square than have used Twitter. And now Reshma 2010 is the first campaign in America to use Pro.Act.Ly.

Pro.Act.Ly is going to define campaigning going into 2012.

Reshma 2010 is not just a campaign for the 14th district, it is a campaign for all of New York City, the entire metro region. She is the embodiment of the New Woman. That has got to speak to the East Side. Women should be able to take equality for granted. The brave new world of technological innovation also has to shift the paradigm on gender relations. They go hand in hand. Technological innovation and social progress have to go hand in hand for technological innovation to be meaningful.

Call Out The Sexism

Reshma Saujani deserves the support of the entire NY tech community. She has huge support among the techies in the Bay Area. New York gets to match that. The only other New York politician wearing the tech hat is Mayor Bloomberg himself. I like the guy. I supported his reelection effort last year.

I became an Independent For Bloomberg, I think Reshma Saujani might be able to pull me back into the Democratic fold.

I call it a double whammy. Obama went to Harvard. Clinton went to Yale. Reshma Saujani went to both. Another double whammy is she is a woman, and she is Indian. Electing Barack Obama was a big deal. Race is America's original sin. But electing someone of Reshma Saujani's background is going to be a bigger deal. It should not matter if people who look like you are 70% or 12% of the country. It should not matter if they are not even 1%. Individual excellence should count. But for anyone to suggest Indians are any kind of a minority is off. We live in a global era.

Reshma Saujani is the national candidate for the tech community, the innovation community across the board. I am not just talking dot coms, but also green tech, bio tech, nano tech.
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Top Web Properties

Fred Wilson has displayed this chart at his blog this morning.


Compare this to some of the charts from the past years. Facebook's rise is amazing.



Yahoo, AOL and eBay are still going strong. Wisdom has it they are also rans. The numbers tell you otherwise.

I am surprised by Apple.com's numbers. Are there aspects of their site I am not aware of? That is very possible considering I have never bought an Apple product. My next computer might be an Acer.

Apple: Remarkable

I am glad to see Twitter at 29, but they could be doing much better. 2009 was the year they worked on scaling. But I strongly felt they needed to walk and chew gum at the same time. They needed to add features and simplify the service while they had the buzz.

And I am glad my blogging platform of choice - Blogger - is doing so well.

Fred notes the US has only 17% of the internet audience, but that 75% of the top web properties are based in the US. The number that I find myself looking at is the 1.2 billion number. I want that number to go up substantially. The new country - the Internet - is the biggest country in the world.

Fred's observation is extra true in the blogosphere. There are more bloggers than lawyers in America. Go pro.

The Big Money Is Not In Blogging

Here's Google's chart.

Average Internet User in Singapore Spent More than 10 Hours Viewing Online Video in April
Visitation to Travel Sites in India Surges 50 Percent in Past Year
Social Networking Ranks as Fastest-Growing Mobile Content Category
comScore Releases April 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings
Nearly 9 out of 10 Internet Users in Hong Kong View Online Video
comScore Announces Introduction of AdEffx Smart Control™ Ground-Breaking Methodology for Measuring Digital Advertising Effectiveness< comScore Reports Q1 2010 U.S. E-Commerce Spending Accelerates to a 10 Percent Growth vs. Year Ago
comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top-Growing Properties and Site Categories for April 2010
Mobile Music on the Increase Across Europe
Americans Received 1 Trillion Display Ads in Q1 2010 as Online Advertising Market Rebounds from 2009 Recession
Customer Experience Takes Center Stage in Online Banking
comScore Releases April 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings
Regional ISPs Drive Broadband Growth in Rural Markets
comScore to Speak at Upcoming Investor Conferences in May
Mexico’s Online Population Soars 20 Percent in Past Year

The Next Web, January 2010: comScore, Calacanis, Wilson, And TechCrunch – Oh My!
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