The Truth About Mashable
January 7, 2010
Author 
In Maybe you heard: AOL is rumored to be purchasing Mashable. It’s circulating amongst serveral sources. Whether or not it’s credible isn’t the point – it’s about time we took a look into Mashable and put out in the open what most quietly think about the site. And the rumor of their purchase make it perfect to discuss now.
Whether you actually like Mashable’s content is moot: no denying they are successful in terms of numbers, beating out rival top technology blog TechCrunch in raw traffic in May, 2009 – although having far less RSS subscribers (TechCrunch has more than 4 million to Mashable’s paltry 345K+).
But while they’re successful from a numbers perspective – are they truly worth the rumored 15-25 million internal valuation? And, more importantly, are they actually influencing those who really matter in the technology/marketing crowd? I’m hesitant to say the answer of either of those is yes.
Now, before I point out the emperor has no clothes I will say Mashable isn’t all bad.
They have linked to my blog and referenced me in posts on more than one occasion. Adam Ostrow is a great guy and even wrote up one of my campaigns when I was a PR strategist. The creator Pete Cashmore is clever, no doubt – I’ve referenced his cunning in a post on social media as a buzzword. Many of the writers there such as Tamar Weinberg are brilliant.
That’s the good.
The bad?
They are focused on quantity over quality
One could argue they are the Demand Media of the technology blogosphere. They churn out content for the sake of churning out content. Getting them out of my RSS reader was a relief.
Think I’m exaggerating? They have a mind-numbing 158 posts just about Twitter being down as just one example. That’s the internet equivalent of running a story on TV because there is a car accident. What’s the news here? It’s worthless (note in the screengrab they’ll even post these stories multiple times daily):
No filter for guest posts
Mashable does have high quality writer’s and guest posters. No doubt. But they also allow equally horrendous social media charlatans to post. Not calling anyone out (although I’ve called out people in the past) because there are so many examples of this, it would be unfair to pick on one or two people. Basically – if someone comes to you to try and sell marketing or technology services and their only proof point is having guest posted on Mashable…run.
They’re exaggerating their community size
Mashable claims 2.2 million people in their community, as noted in the above graphic. Sure, if you combine all their metrics, including their mammoth Twitter following of 1.8 million+ followers (they are on the suggested user list, which delivers a slew of low-quality/inactive followers) it would equal out. But the numbers are bloated. The truth is no one has a million followers on Twitter. It’s an attempt at social proofing, but is overkill – the numbers are too far fetched. The 345K RSS number they’re not showing, while still inflated (as is everyone’s) thanks to FriendFeed, is at least plausible.
They’re an SEO product
If you keep a technology or marketing blog, I bet you share a SERP or two with Mashable. And unless your post went popular, Mashable who constantly pumps out content (quality or otherwise) is probably outranking you for it. I actually wouldn’t have a problem with this, but it comes at a disservice to search visitors who might otherwise have come across genuine advice versus that churned out by the “Twitter/Facebook/social media content machine.” I’ve been trying to research things and came up with Mashable results up top in Google, only to scroll lower and find the real story. Also, their entire model of sourcing as many guest bloggers as possible (again, quality or otherwise) plays into feeding both the head and the tail of Google.
TechCrunch is known for snark/breaking news, ReadWriteWeb is known for depth
What is Mashable known for? Exactly. It’s the classic Target, K-Mart and Wal-Mart situation. K-Mart lost because they had no identity and got stuck in the middle, whereas Wal-Mart became known for deals and Target skewed to the higher end. While K-Mart was successful for awhile, eventually their lack of brand identity ruined them. And that’s exactly what will happen here.
Wrapping up
None of these things are bad if you’re Mashable – they’re great. They helped position the brand as appealing to the masses, then advertisers, and potentially for purchase if the rumors are true. However I highly doubt any marketing, technology or web pros worth their salt find blinding insights from Mashable daily. That’s just not what they provide.
Update: Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable left a comment – see my response in an updated post here.
Josh Braaten replied | Jan 7, 2010 (31 comments)
What a fresh take on Mashable… While I think all of your points are true and valid, I wonder if AOL knows all this?
For a company that slowly let its grip on its brand identity slip away throughout the 90′s and early 00′s, you’d think that they’d be a little more leery of picking up something just because it was popular right now.
Stuart Foster replied | Jan 7, 2010 (7 comments)
Hahahahaha. That guest posting on Mashable bit nailed the me of a year ago…hard.
Good salient points Adam. I’ll still go back to them though because I like the reporting/analysis that Adam, Ben and Tamar do. (Also incredibly useful to forward to executives for easily digestible information.)
ryanve replied | Jan 7, 2010 (1 comment)
To me, Mashable is known for breaking web-related news the average person cares about, providing resources, and more recently, breaking entertaining news that relates to social media. TC and RWW are more detailed and techie, while Mashable is succinct and IMO open to a wider audience. Mashable makes it easier to comment because they use Disqus—it kills me that TC, RWW, and my favorite, Wired, don’t use Disqus). TC may do better with RSS because their audience is more techie-dense and your average person still doesn’t know what RSS is.
Glen Allsopp replied | Jan 7, 2010 (3 comments)
Very nice Adam. To be honest, at first I didn’t think you would have much ‘dirt’ but I have noticed myself the sheer mass of content they are posting, often with little relevance.
The whole site has turned into a twitter-pleaser but if it’s going to net them $15m, I’m not sure I blame them.
Very thought-provoking and that’s why you’re one of my fav bloggers :)
Cheers,
Glen
Tim Jahn replied | Jan 7, 2010 (59 comments)
“The whole site has turned into a twitter-pleaser but if it’s going to net them $15m, I’m not sure I blame them.”
Why not blame them? If you had the chance to develop a site full of meaningless content for the average Joe and get paid $15 million for it, would you?
Or would you want do actually make a difference and do something worthwhile?
Glen Allsopp replied | Jan 7, 2010 (3 comments)
The only reason they are getting so much traffic is because people want to read what they write. If they’re producing what people want, I think they deserve it.
- Glen
Tim Jahn replied | Jan 7, 2010 (59 comments)
I hear you but that’s a weak argument in my eyes. If the CEOs of the car companies want more money and want to lay more people off (and that’s what them and their friends want), do they deserve it?
Glen Allsopp replied | Jan 7, 2010 (3 comments)
If you ask me something relevant then I’ll happily answer it for you :)
Tim Jahn replied | Jan 7, 2010 (59 comments)
My point is that doing something of low quality for the sake of making lots of money is stupid.
Clearly you don’t agree.
Adam Sherk replied | Jan 7, 2010 (4 comments)
I enjoy following Mashable, TechCrunch and the like but you’re right you’ve got to weed through a lot to get to the good stuff. More often than not I end up having to hit “mark all as read” in Google Reader just to keep it from being overwhelming.
That said, good for them for kicking butt and building a successful site.
Dan Taylor replied | Jan 7, 2010 (1 comment)
Good points about, but I have to say that Mashable does a great job getting the news out about the latest developments in social media, technology, mobile, etc., whether relevant or not. When you post a high volume of posts, some of them are bound to be irrelevant. Overall, I think that Mashable offers quality posts that provide me with the information I need to keep me abreast of the latest news.
Pete Cashmore replied | Jan 7, 2010 (2 comments)
Hey Adam,
I love this kind of post cos it helps us figure out what we can do better. Obviously I’m not in full agreement with your points, but I’d love to get your take (and the commenters’, if they can spare a moment) on what we could do to improve in your eyes. Some questions for you:
–What’s the one thing Mashable could change to make the biggest improvement, do you think?
–With regard to brand identity: what do you see as the opportunity here? What type of content would improve this perception?
–Do you have suggestions for the types of guest posters you’d like to see? Who would add the most value here, do you think? Specific names would be super helpful, but even a broader set of suggestions would give me some action items to work with.
–Do you have further suggestions for improvement not mentioned above?
Thanks in advance Adam!
–Pete
Adam Singer replied | Jan 7, 2010 (563 comments)
Thanks for the comment Pete – those are great questions and I appreciate that you’re interested in hearing responses. I’ll create a new post tomorrow answering them so it isn’t lost in the comments. It’s only fair I do that since you came here and asked.
Cheers,
Adam
Tim Jahn replied | Jan 7, 2010 (59 comments)
“–What’s the one thing Mashable could change to make the biggest improvement, do you think?”
Concentrate more on quality and your niche, rather than quantity and reaching everybody everywhere.
“–With regard to brand identity: what do you see as the opportunity here? What type of content would improve this perception?”
You call yourselves the “Social Media Guide” and you’re known as that through social media circles. Stay focused on that content and let TMZ handle Tiger Woods, CNN handle terrorism, etc.
“–Do you have suggestions for the types of guest posters you’d like to see? Who would add the most value here, do you think? Specific names would be super helpful, but even a broader set of suggestions would give me some action items to work with.”
I personally don’t really see a big difference between your guest post content and regular writer content, so I think Adam has more here.
“–Do you have further suggestions for improvement not mentioned above?”
My biggest suggestion is to simply focus. Be the best social media news site in the world and appeal to the folks who want that. When you start mixing in TMZ content, CNN content, TechCrunch content, your value becomes diluted in the eyes of the reader.
Just my two cents :) I must say, Pete, this is not the first time I’ve seen you respond to criticism so eloquently and professionally, and frankly, I’m always impressed. You obviously care about your community and about trying new things, so kudos to that.
Adam Singer replied | Jan 7, 2010 (563 comments)
Agreed Tim – I really like that Pete came here to respond – as a communications pro he earned huge points with me there. Now tomorrow he’ll earn a constructive post for the brand. Either way they win, as more posts/buzz about Mashable is a good thing for them.
Matt McGee replied | Jan 8, 2010 (2 comments)
Pete – Adam is far from the only person who feels this way about Mashable. If you want one suggestion, it’s to stay on topic. You churn out low-quality content about stuff like Tiger Woods, MSFT office, and a ton of other things that have zero relevance to social media.
Focus. You’ve lost your identity. It’s a shame…
Shari Weiss replied | Jan 7, 2010 (23 comments)
Enjoyed the give and take of this conversation, especially reading Pete’s “elegant” request for valuable suggestions.
I have some Guest Poster suggestions, which I’ll include in a comment on Adam’s post tomorrow. But, for a first one, I’d love to offer up something of mine.
Shari Weiss
PS Adam, you remain my Fav Blogger — and my first recommendation to my marketing students at San Francisco State.
Catherine Lockey replied | Jan 7, 2010 (63 comments)
Wow. All I can say is I’m astonished by the mutual respect. Impressive.
Jake Rocheleau replied | Jan 7, 2010 (1 comment)
This is a really neat post dude. You have some of the most interesting posts on your blog, keep up the awesome work!
John Bradley replied | Jan 7, 2010 (3 comments)
Thanks for that Adam. You have given me permission to delete the feed. I’m just a part timer at this stage and can’t spend my whole life following what others say. I’m following a few posts and particularly enjoy yours and noted in one of your latest that you average 2.something posts a week. Whatever it is, it’s a nice quantity. Given that you also feed me to others I can spend half an hour or so a post just looking through what you (and your links) have to say.
But with Mashable I have been overwhelmed and couldn’t see why everybody rated it.
Scrivs replied | Jan 7, 2010 (1 comment)
A refreshing take on Mashable, but you almost feel it is something that most people in the industry feel. Mashable’s dirty little secret from the past couple of years is how they built up traffic. Initially it was through the use of a custom social network on their site. This custom social network was filled with images of sexy women that you would find on Myspace and the like. Spammers came to fill the site with porn ads and other types of stuff. This didn’t stop people from still signing up because back then these people didn’t know any better. You can still find these pages if you know what to search for.
They also weren’t the type of people Mashable was writing traffic for.
Next they started to focus on Myspace backgrounds and other widgets to add to Myspace profiles. If you follow the web you know that a couple of people have made a pretty penny off of these type of sites and with Mashable having a decent ranking in Google they only got stronger because of it. Again though, the people they write content for wouldn’t be interested in these things.
When Digg hit the scene they made sure to become the “list” blog where they would posts non-stop lists that would shoot up on Digg. Of course any site that has a ton of traffic will get attention, but nobody asked where Mashable was getting the traffic or how. You certainly didn’t see it from links on other sites.
Now if you look at the present site you will be even more baffled if you look at the number of comments on their entries. You might be lucky to find more than 5 on them. With that kind of traffic there is no reason for that unless people really aren’t reading what is being produced. There are even some occasions where I checked the people that are retweeting them and Mashable is the only account they follow and they have 0 followers themselves.
Now as you have mentioned I don’t fault or blame Mashable for taking this route. Pete was a genius and used the system to the best of his abilities to create a product that people talk about. Pete is a good guy overall and I must admit I wish I was in his shoes.
Jay Philips replied | Jan 7, 2010 (2 comments)
Agreed, Mashable went Twitter specific. If they are the “Social Media Go To” site why are they not writing about all the social media sites? Some nice tutorials for newbies would be good. Personally I am a fan of TechCrunch, ProBlogger and popurls. The other thing that turned me away from even going to the Mashable site is the fact that they went ad happy, have you noticed how slow it is to load a page from their site?
Amelia Chen replied | Jan 8, 2010 (1 comment)
You’re right. Just a few minutes before I read your post, Twitter was down and indeed I instinctively went to Mashable to see if there was any news. What a coincidence.
Charlotte Britton replied | Jan 8, 2010 (1 comment)
What a relief someone has spoken out about Mashable. I keep yoyo-ing on including them in my Google Reader or not. Right now they are in, but I have to say my heart sinks when I haven’t logged in for 24 hours and there’s over 60 articles to read.
Completely agree that they generate content for content sake. Some of it is complete tosh. There’s the occasional article that’s worth reading, and for that reason only I continue to include them
@RaynaNyc replied | Jan 8, 2010 (2 comments)
At a time when harsh sarcasm and rude behaviour is becoming more common online, this has been a refreshing change, and reminder that intelligent dialogue and dissent can occur in social media (in the same conversation). I like the changes I’ve seen on Mashable’s website and how they’re trying to cover the ever changing social media /technology space but do recognize that this is an evolutionary process. For a while there, one new to Mashable would guess that it was an extension of Twitter, and we all know that there is a lot more occuring withith social media. Most important to me here is that Pete Cashmore is an active participant who seems to take a great interest in what his audience has to say about the Mashable brand, the services, and experience and like most successful brands they grow, change, err and listen. I won’t always be interested in what they cover, but I greatly admire the growth and improvement of the message and what they’re trying to accomplish in the community they serve.
Zahid Lilani replied | Jan 8, 2010 (1 comment)
I have been reading Mashable since 2006. In the beginning I really thought they were different from TechCrunch in many ways. The blog felt more personal. Now, Mashable is all hype. I did a story on my blog about Mashable’s re-tweet and shares disconnect pointing out that their enormous Twitter followers are mostly bots or people who have created numerous accounts on Twitter to feed their stream with Mashable’s RSS. On the other hand, their Facebook shares numbers are fairly low because 99% of the shares are done by real humans who read the post.
Mashable has some quality authors who I am sure will one day move on and do their own thing. Even Pete Cashmore is now writing for CNN and is moving on so what’s to stop all the others.
Once AOL buys Mashable, that will be the end of it as we know it because no one wants to read a media corporation’s blog which will most likely be biased.
Thanks you for your in-depth analysis.
Colin Alsheimer replied | Jan 9, 2010 (1 comment)
Completely agree with your post. Personally, I too cannot keep up with the volume of content that they produce. I also think that that it’s (mostly) lowest common denominator content for the social and tech space. I often cringe when I see every single person in my Tweet stream tweeting about Mashable content.
Occasionally, I’ll find a good post that leaves me with something to think about, but it hasn’t happens in awhile.
I do dig that Pete commented on the post though, good for him.
Murlu replied | Feb 11, 2010 (3 comments)
Thank you for calling out Mashable, it’s such a relief to see people that don’t fall over themselves because of the website.
I admit that I was caught up with checking Mashable each day, a few times, but eventually everything became disinteresting.
Mashable is often, as you said, the news channel that jumps on ever little story. There are countless [rumored] posts but what good does this truly bring the community? It often feels like a tabloid mag that’s talking about the latest celebrity break up.
The main problem is the substance. Everything you need to know about the story is pretty much summed up in the headline. Once you’re in the post, there isn’t much information that is very satisfying.
To be honest, I’m not sure how Mashable would be able to improve its content. It’s the TMZ of online media. It fits within its focus but I think if it were to go any more in depth (such as RWW) it would loose its touch.
I rather not bother with Mashable and stick with ReadWriteWeb, the content is very fulfilling and less gossipy.
Divyang Patel replied | Jun 3, 2010 (3 comments)
What an in-depth article this is! And speclially liked the comparison of K-mart V/s Wall-Mart. Learned one important thing : “Building brand in a niche is important”. Will try on my blog (though with limited resources at my disposal).
Can you suggest any brand building practice for small bloggers (or entrepreneurs for that matter!)