Eye on Winer

There are so many things wrong with today’s post on Feedburner that I scarcely know where to begin.

Feedburner reports that 609K people subscribe to the TechCrunch feed.

When I got a prominent link from a TechCrunch piece on September 30, it generated 228 hits (according to Google Analytics). Now it could be there was some other reason less than 1 in 1000 of the readers clicked on the link, or it may be that these sources are over-reporting the influence of TechCrunch.

Assuming that he’s telling the truth… so what? This site received a “prominent link” from Dave a few months ago and it generated about a half-dozen hits. It took me a few days to even notice it in the stats. All that means is that his readers either aren’t particularly interested in what he linked to (based on how he ’sold’ it) or they’re already reading. But you can count on Dave to take any scintilla of tenuously linked evidence to try to tear down someone he doesn’t like. In this case, he’s clearly miffed that 1) he dropped on the Leaderboard a few days ago and 2) Arrington then (correctly) accused him of spamming TechMeme.

He then talks about the perverse incentives to link to TechCrunch. Two problems here. First, he’s been saying for a long time (and he’s right) that the whole IDEA of the web is to send people away. There are already non-altruistic motivations for linking out, so pointing them out (and then acting like this is big news) is highly disingenuous — except that the Winer Double Standard applies: when something helps him or people he likes, it’s good and right — when that same thing helps people he doesn’t like, it’s wrong and needs fixing.

Second, is this passage (emphasis mine):

Since Arrington’s pieces tend to rise to the top of the page, pieces that link to them become more visible (they show up in the Discussion links), and the chances that another blogger is going to point to them go up. All it takes is one or two of those pointers to promote your piece to the top level, and that really boosts your visibility, and now that the Leaderboard is there, it could make that status semi-permanent, creating an even greater incentive to point. So people can and do, at least sometimes, point to TechCrunch not because they think one of their pieces is worthy of a comment for its own sake, rather because it gives them status and flow, and if they’re running ads on their site, money

There’s a pretty good probability that this is the case, that people in fact do point to TechCrunch to ride its coattails onto TechMeme… but does he have any proof of that? I sincerely doubt it — unless he’s the one doing it.

Hmm.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Feedburner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.