What TechCrunch teaches us about repositioning a blog

In our blogging 101 series, I’ve spoken regularly about the need to continually review what you’re writing to best find things that work. Einstein said that the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and the same holds true for blogs: yes, it takes time to establish a blog, but likewise there’s no point going on forever if it’s not working.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a man I can say many things about (despite rumors, most of them positive), but there’s one trait I’ve always admired in Michael, and that’s his constant drive to work out what works, and change on an ongoing basis. Stats for TechCrunch are notoriously hard to come by (they’re blocked in Quantcast for example), but Alexa shows that from around May last year, TechCrunch’s traffic and rank started to slide. There was an improvement in November, but only to levels below pre-May. Stagnant probably isn’t the right word, because TechCrunch on a bad day does more page views than most sites out there, but certainly there was no growth.

Come late March, the chart started heading north. As of today, TechCrunch has risen from around 6,000 in Alexa to just outside the top 1000. Obama was elected in January, but in April change came to TechCrunch. So what changed?

Repositioning to PoptweetCrunch

PoptweetCrunch is a name used by some observers privately to describe the change at TechCrunch starting in late March, but fully taking hold in April. Sensing a trend in the market, Arrington smartly called that posts about Twitter, sometimes mixed in with celebrities was a great way to build traffic. He hired the very capable MG Siegler, who had gotten a name for himself as a consumer oriented tech writer at VentureBeat, and gave him the primary task of writing about Twitter. Siegler does do other posts (his critics may not agree), but he’s the chief Twitter correspondent for lack of a better term. With Siegler on board, TechCrunch has thrived.

The results from the new mix of content don’t just show itself on Alexa, but on other services as well. Posts about Twitter are heavily retweeted over non-Twitter posts from TechCrunch, and this helps drive traffic. On the small but popular with a few meme tracker Techmeme, TechCrunch has risen from under 6% of all mentions, to nearly 9% today, and will likely go past 10% in the near future. Some have suggested that the close personal relationship between Techmeme’s owner and MG Seigler helps in this regard, but I believe that to be unfair: any idea that Techmeme is fair and impartial to begin with has long been dismissed, and I don’t believe that MG Seigler would get more favors than other sites and writers that are favored by the site, over those not in the club. Further: the drop in VentureBeat’s Techmeme ranking is somewhat mirrored in the rise of TechCrunch with MG on board.

All in all the repositioning of the site has been a huge success in terms of traffic and in bringing in new readers, and you can’t dispute that.

Mistakes

The success though of the move to PoptweetCrunch hasn’t been seamless, and there’s some good lessons in this for all sites.

The change hasn’t been universally embraced by long term readers. Any change any site makes is always going to have dissent, no matter how much you try. The marginal cost of losing old readers at TechCrunch has been the gain of more new readers, so from a business perspective it makes perfect sense.

Here’s what I would have done though to somewhat appease older readers: I would have offered a clean feed. Maybe not lots of feeds (and in retrospect, that was an mistake we made here at The Inquisitr), but a separate feed called “startup news.” That way you could offer a feed to long term readers who only wanted to read about startup news, and who didn’t want to read about Kanye West and Twitter.

Commenting policy is an issue: TechCrunch has gone from one extreme to the other in comment censorship, and that does alienate some people. When I started my 12 month stint there, comments were never deleted, a policy I believe today to be the wrong one. But likewise, dissent on posts is regularly deleted on TechCrunch now, not just the extreme stuff, but more moderate views. I should note that they still do leave some dissent up there, and in that regard the implementation is very hit and miss. Michael Arrington once told me to ignore the commenters, but today TechCrunch doesn’t ignore them enough. TechCrunch should make a clear (or clearer) commenting policy that is a little more open to dissent, but within reason.

Conclusion

If one of the biggest tech blogs in the land feels the need to shift focus to drive traffic, it should be a sign to other blogs that shifting isn’t a sign of defeat, but an opportunity waiting to happen. Try new things, give up on old things if they aren’t working, and ultimately work out what works best for your site.

(image: lalawag)