Web 2.0 Tastemaker 2007: Blogging

Every revolution needs its reporter and every reporter needs a medium. For Web 2.0, you can’t do much better than Mike Arrington. Whether you love him, hate him, or have no opinion you must at least respect the man for his ability to spin an idle rumor into a powerful meme. He may not always be correct, and people may not always agree with his opinions but for up to the minute reporting on the movers and shakers — he always has the inside track.

A Quick Bio

Mike Arrington was born in 1970 in Orange, California. He spent most of his early life between California and Surrey, England and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a major in Economics. In 1995 he graduated from Stanford Law School.

His sizeable list of career bullet points goes something like this:

He worked for O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, dealing exclusively in Technology.

He went to work for RealNames a company that didn’t quite make it public before the bubble burst.

He went on to co-found Achex (the current back end infrastructure behind Wester Union) and sold it for $32 million.

He ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com).

He was the COO of Razorgator

He founded Edgeio

And he currently writes for TechCrunch.

Great, now that we’ve gotten through that. It takes far more than having a padded resume to make it into Web 2.0’s Tastemakers. If that was the only requirement, I would have just taken out my map of Palo Alto, stuck a pin in it and wrote about whoever I happened to be pointing at. The country is filled with clever, industrious people in technology, many of whom have done more and been more successful than Mike. Why then was he chosen? Lets dig a little deeper.

Nearest Competition

Robert McManus of ReadWriteWeb and Erick Schonfeld of The Next Net were close competitors for this category, but among other things the following graph sold me on Mike as the more appropriate choice.

Mike is in blue, Robert is in red and Erick is in gold. As you can see, over the past two years Techcrunch’s reach has expanded in ways that these two older properties have been unable to keep up with. They are all successful in their own right, but purely on the basis of engaging the public — Mike shines above the rest.

Compete, another web analytics company, gives us a different look at TechCrunch’s reach.

What’s important here is not the absolute growth in TechCrunch’s popularity, but the fact that it is trending up exponentially. Steady growth is a given when dealing with a blog. If you generate compelling content, people are going to come out to read it. If you continue to develop an archive of this material, soon enough you will have a following worthy of note. If Mike merely followed this pattern, TechCrunch would be another irrelevant Web 2.0 (none of us are irrelevant, but we are talking about objective scale here), but his popularity has surged over the past two years. The answer to “why” was the major reason that he made the list.

What We Can Learn

Honestly, as impressive as great statistics might be, Web 2.0 Tastemakers is not about selecting the most popular sites or about whiz bang technology. This list covers those sites that are making the most out of the industries in which they operate, and have found a way to take very basic principles and expand them in ways that we would all do well to mimic.

Controlling The Meme

Not every story will stick. In fact, any blogger worth his salt will tell you that predicting exactly what will raise the hackles of your audience is hit and miss at best. Sometimes a story you believe will generate scads of traffic wallows in obscurity, other times a ten second fluff piece will bring unique views for months on end. Learning to cater to the fickle nature of the crowd is what makes merely good blogs great, Mike Arrington is a master of this concept.

If you spend enough time on TechCrunch you will find a mix of startup news, product reviews, and general industry fodder. Sprinkled among these disposable articles, and usually coming sometime in the wee hours of the morning, is a story crafted to bring in eyeballs. Whether it is the most important rumor of the day, or an op-ed piece with teeth, this story is designed to ignite the passion of his commenters and drive traffic through the roof.

An Analysis

This next graph is TechCrunch’s search trend data since its inception. If you notice the spikes in the graph, these are all periods of extremely high growth in TechCrunch’s search queries and by proxy growth in its user base. Lets explore the news that lead to this growth.

His first “big scoop” (the first big hump on the graph) came in the form of leaked Google Calendar screenshots. The first trackback came in at around 12:30AM and he scored over 500 comments (and substantially more readers) from this story.

In order of major traffic jumps the next stories were as follows

TechCrunch Rates Yahoo Maps as Best Mapping Service

Completely Unsubstantiated Google/Youtube Rumor

Sam Sethi fired from TechCrunch UK

What we can gather from all of these headlines is that exponential growth can have both internal and external drivers, depending primarily on how established you are as a property. When TechCrunch was first starting out, its major windfall came in the form of breaking rumors about other popular sites (the Googles and Yahoos of the world).

What is interesting is that the last big surge in people looking for information about TechCrunch came when they made an internal change, firing an editor and leaving a void in a partner site’s staff.

The Rules

When you are first establishing yourself as a property, your internal politics are irrelevant. It will always be the case that one tried and true method of generating a name for yourself is on the shoulder of giants. Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft blogger, became famous because he was a source of insider information and opinion for a company known for being rather tight lipped.

Mike, with his sources and connections drew a large portion of his audience using the same idea — generating great content to hold his audience’s attention and growing it in leaps by releasing juicy tidbits about sites exponential larger than his own.

One final point

Lets not think that the ability to “get there first” is the only thing that has gotten TechCrunch where it was. Any story, if properly put together can generate buzz and if really well crafted, all stories have the opportunity to do so.

Mike Arrington relies most heavily on his ability to manage the meme and make the most out of all the content on the site, even the content that does not “sell”. He is an active participant on his own blog, and he willing to engage his reader base. The point is that at the end of the day, he runs a good blog because he is a good blogger and that is why he is a Web 2.0 Tastemaker.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Deal Makers and Heart Breakers

For many Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, TechCrunch has become a must read. Internet companies mentioned on the blog often report huge increases in business after they’re featured. Others get unsolicited calls from venture capitalists who want to give them money.

–Wall Street Journal

Criticism

Criticism has been lodged that TechCrunch, by it’s prominence in the industry can favorably influence the industry and that Arrington, a shareholder and advisor to several technology companies would want to influence those companies. Other concerns have been raised that TechCrunch could be in a position to want to write favorably (or not disclose potentially damaging information) about it’s advertisers or sponsors.

–Aboutus.org

Just as a note, Mike now makes disclosure of all possible conflicts of interest readily available for those who wish to peruse them.

Related Sites

• CrunchNotes
• MobileCrunch
• CrunchGear
• TalkCrunch
• CrunchBoard
• TechCrunch France
• TechCrunch UK
• TechCrunch Japan