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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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pete is a genius. He, 19 year-olds guy started Mashable in his bedroom.
Now, 10,000 km far from it, in Vietnam, visiting Mashable is one of my daily routines.

Thank alot, @Zemanta

Anonymous said...

Hi @Paramendra,
Thank alot for your great post. I'm a crazy fan of Mashable (Checking Social Web tips on Mashable is one of my morning routine). Pete Cashmore - I quitely hear about him, but how did he make the success of Mashable that has still be a curious question for me. But, I got it. Thanks again !