Interesting post today from Michael Arrington and TechCrunch on their embargo policy. I wouldn't have trusted them to hold an embargo anyway, but good to know their new official policy.
I tend to agree with Arrington's commentary for the most part. We've seen broken embargo's on a lot of announcements in the past year, often by news sites looking to get an edge on their competition. A broken embargo can often favor the client though and help drive interest in the news/products being announced.
We've been talking about the challenges to the traditional media embargo in the new media environment for a while now and can't say this is a big surprise. In the future, I think we'll see less "embargos" and more exclusives in targeted sites/outlets where we have the strongest relationships and the news will have the greatest impact.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Death To The Embargo
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
While Arrington should be applauded for trying to promote (save?) his site, I really think his problem is the smaller blogs and tech sites are receiving the news the same time TechCrunch is.
The reality is, when the information is out there in a variety of places, all at one time, sites such as TechCrunch see a hit on their all-important click counts. Thus losing revenue from their ad sales.
In the case of a broken embargo, the news turns into an exclusive for whoever broke it and the traffic flocks to that site. It's nothing new, we've all seen it.
It'll be interesting to see if this practice could have an immediate effect on whether media who break embargos will see some form of punishment from the tech companies.
My guess though, probably not.
There's been some interesting commentary on this post today. This one from Valleywag, certainly not an Arrington Fan:
"What makes this all hilarious is that Arrington is really angry because he views public relations firms as his competition. He wants to be the gatekeeper and kingmaker for all the Valley's startups, controlling the public rollout of all of their most obscure milestones. The grandiosity of his territorial behavior, over such small turf, is tragicomic — like a dog pissing on every side of a tree, just to make sure we know it's his."
Post a Comment