7. Engadget
• “Gadget blog”
• Founded 2004. Key players Peter Rojas,
Jason Calacanis, Brian Alvey
• Peter:15 blog posts a day
• At start: effectively one man coverage of
CES
• Low pay, no office. BUT: had stock.
8. Engadget
• 18 months after launch, Weblogs, Inc. and
Engadget.com sold to AOL for ~$25 million
9. Engadget today
• 50 blog posts/weekday
• More than 50,000 blog posts total
• 100(s?) of millions of page views/month
• Official blog partner of CES
• Adweek Readers’ Choice for Blog of the
Decade
13. Me @ Engadget
• June 2005 - December 2007
• ~1,750 blog posts, ~250,000 words
• Blogs, features, interviews, liveblogging,
photos, video, “whatever works”
• 2x CES, US iPhone launch, UK iPhone press
conference
14. Engadget
• Owns a niche: best blog covering consumer
technology and gadgets
15. Engadget
• Why does it own this niche?
• Does more technology coverage, better
and faster than anyone else
16. Engadget
• Search engine friendly
• Descriptive titles, body of posts have lots of
keywords, effective backlinking, tagging
• Bespoke CMS- Blogsmith, great scale. Grew
with the site. TMZ.
• Respecting the community (Reader meet-
ups, AskEngadget, The Engadget Show,
product giveaways, strong ethical policy).
17. Engadget
• Always profitable
• $500,000 venture capital from Mark Cuban
• Other writers started on nothing, or $2 a
post. I started on $6/post, left on $15.
18. What works?
• Scale
• Niche content
• Quantity + Quality (in that order)
• SEO
• Grow with your revenue
19. What works?
• +30% traffic/month, or YOU DIE.
• Niche needs to be big so you can scale.
• Need to cover that niche broadly and
better than anyone else.
• Make sure your broad, quality content is
highly searchable.
• Make sure your costs are always lower than
your revenue.
20. Money/Advertising
• Adsense
• Banner ads
• Promotions
• Sponsorship of gift guides, events,
conference coverage
• See: http://advertising.gawker.com/
21. Engadget
• “It's not that we're doing this all for you.
No, sir or madam -- we're doing this
because we are you. “ -Joseph Flately,
Engadget.com
• BUT: strong editorial ethics.
22. Ethics
• Buy your own gear (apart from AOL issue
laptops/monitors)
• Give away or return any products given by
companies
• Pay for all travel/accommodation
• NYTimes ethics
25. Summary
• Early mover
• Better than competitors
• Loooooooow cost, high profit
• Aol: incompetence, not interference
• Open content (free iPhone app, full content
RSS)
• Other: 20 hour days @CES (fun for me, but
worth noting)