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How not to get on covered on TechCrunch

46 points by FiReaNG3L ↗ HN
I launched my startup officially last week (Eureka Science News - http://esciencenews.com - intelligent news aggregator, fully automated, similar to techmeme and Google News, but with full content on the site - check out the /about page if you want to know more). I got amazingly positive feedback from it; got covered on the front page of Drupal with a full write-uo on how I built the site, in details(http://drupal.org/node/261340); Drupal is the open-source CMS I built my site with, so it was my way of giving back to the community.

After that, I figured 'hey! Maybe I actually have a chance with TechCrunch!'. In my mind TC covers only very high profile, tech-related startups, so at first I didn't think that they would be interested by a science news site started part-time by a PhD student in retrovirology ;) So I submitted my story via the form on their contact page. No answer for two days, so I submitted it to Mashable, which wrote a post about the site very quickly (http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/eureka-science-new/). Cool, but the traffic this link generated was much lower than I expected (< 200 views, Drupal gave me > 6000).

I then looked back at TC contact page and noticed a the 'newstip' email link at the top of the page; the contact form is much more visible, but now I can tell that the newstip email link is much more efficient; I wrote a quick mail about my site and the coverage that we got so far on Drupal and Mashable, thinking that it would help getting covered on TechCrunch.

This time they answered promptly; I was very excited! But they said that while my site was very interesting, they like to cover news first and that they were going to pass on this one since we got covered by Mashable, even if they love science.

It's very sad because Eureka Science News is the first vertical I used my intelligent news aggregator for - copyright-free press releases are readily available for most news published daily; I'm looking for VC funding to license Associated Press content to build a website covering all news categories. Getting on TC would have helped for sure!

So don't make the same mistake, submit to TechCrunch FIRST via the newstip email link, not the contact form! At worse, you'll get rejected and you can give the exclusive to someone else ;) I sure wish I did, now I won't know the kind of traffic TC can send (but I'm sure its more than the 200 hits I got from Mashable!). I even had nightmares about it last night, a thing you sure want to avoid ;)

38 comments

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swombat
Well duh. TechCrunch make their bread and butter from being the first to announce news X (and from various aggressive rants against twitter, rails, and Blaine Cook).

Isn't this fairly well known already?

pg
Would you please stop signing your posts? They are already signed with your username.
swombat
sigh

I was wondering who was removing my "Daniel"s...

Fine. I'll try. I can't promise one won't slip in sometimes. As I've said in another comment on this exciting topic, I've been signing my posts "Daniel" for over ten years now, so there's bound to be times when I forget not to sign when commenting here. But I'll try my best.

Zak
Slightly off-topic: I've noticed that almost everyone I know signs their emails these days. I don't think that was true 10 years ago. It's always struck me as redundant.
byrneseyeview
Perhaps people emailing ten years ago were more adaptable to new technologies. More of the people who started emailing in the last ten years are likely to see emails as a form of traditional letters.
rory096
I don't see that as true- even tech savvy people seem to do it. I think it might have something to do with email sometimes being seen as a more formal type of online communication, as opposed to instant messaging, or even perhaps less formal emails (there's a distinct difference, in my mind at least, between formal and informal emails; formal emails are written much like letters, whereas informal emails are more like instant messages or Facebook comments).
byrneseyeview
Younger people still report to older people, and usually if you're emailing someone who is your superior (your boss, a customer) you let them determine how formal things will be. This doesn't hold true in every case, but it's common enough to explain the trend.
briansmith
I sign email for the same reason I say "hello" to people when I see them on the street--doing so fulfills social expectations regarding kindness and politeness, making communication seem more personal.

If you sign your email "Thanks, Brian" or "Regards, Brian" or "Cheers, Brian" then that is much better than "- Brian" or nothing at all. Similarly, I include "Dear XXX," or "Hi XXXX, " or at least "XXXX," at the beginning of the message.

sc
TC and Mashable cater to similar audiences, and TC gets about double the hits. We could, perhaps, estimate that you'd get 400 hits from TC.

Unfortunately (and unfortunate for many reasons), science isn't a huge draw in a generalized audience (and both Mashable and TC aren't exactly science-oriented).

FiReaNG3L
I was really surprised from the low hits # from mashable, considering the traffic it gets. I think your explanation make sense, but I think I would have got much more hits from TC.
sc
Perhaps, but the problem with both sites is what Jason Kottke calls "infoglut": they are filters with too much content, so readers have to filter the filter. Most readers are going to instantly filter out content that doesn't speak to their audience, and most readers (again, unfortunately) are going to filter out science.
Tichy
I am not a regular TechCrunch reader, but I find it difficult imagine that they would pass on writing about a hot new startup, just because some other site already wrote about it.
pg
Actually they are fairly rigid about not writing about a launch that has already been covered, especially by Mashable.
FiReaNG3L
Make sense when you think of it, its their competitor.
jonknee
No, it doesn't really make sense. What it the AP wouldn't write about something that Reuters already did? News is news, but demanding first or nothing is a very poor technique.
pg
The AP is a wire service. They deal in commodity news. But it is very common for newspapers and magazines to agree to cover stories in return for an exclusive.
jonknee
Obviously, but this is a mention, not a feature article in an entertainment magazine. Engadget will cover something after Gizmodo and vice versa. It's ridiculous that TechCrunch won't.

I stopped reading TC a while ago because the signal to noise ratio started diving, but I wouldn't read it now even if it had great content. I don't care who has what first, I'll read who's comprehensive and honest.

Mike wants to be the new CNET and that's not going to happen by being a bitch about being first.

alec
It seems that if you want to get covered by TechCrunch, you have to give them an exclusive?
jonknee
I wouldn't worry about it. TechCrunch is not always a huge traffic driver (nor is Mashable obviously) and I wouldn't want to reward their petty games anyway.

What's TC's goal? Covering web startups or covering web startups that Mashable hasn't written about? The content at TC has been going down hill for a long time, but this is really pathetic.

rrival
Having been linked from both Mashable and TC, TC drives >10x the traffic. This is worth considering when announcing a launch.

It's short sighted to not consider that a blog like TC wants to be the first to cover something; there's enough of an echo in the blogosphere already.

motoko
so, about 2000 hits. (<200 * >10x)

It sucks not to be featured on TechCrunch, but this is not a pivotal loss in the life of your startup by any means.

vaksel
especially if you consider that those people are basically just other techies who just want to see your startup's technology, not use your product.

So really unless your target audience are techies, getting featured on sites like that really doesn't do much for you

wehriam
Best of luck to the submitter, but I'm not sure this would be of interest to TC's audience. Editorial oversight is not a petty game.
wavesplash
Wow, TC is getting you to do free PR for them. Pay no mind. I doubt TechCrunch would have written about the site to start with, If you want users then then target publications in your service's niche (user numbers count, everything else is fluff). TechCrunch desperately wants to be 'the place' to launch, but the dirty secret is that the traffic they drive isn't sticky.
aidanf
"but with full content on the site"

I think that republishing someone else's RSS feed in full on your site is at best bad etiquette, at worst it's just plain stealing. I left a comment about it on the drupal page you linked to.

josefresco
I tend to disagree, an "intelligent news aggregator" adds value to a story (by bringing in more sources) and increases circulation for the source. If you construct your RSS properly you can utilize splogs, and aggregators to expand your reach.
aidanf
I don't think that this site is going to "increase circulation for the source".

If you look at it, it is far from obvious that the content is being aggregated from other sources. Looking at the front page one might easily assume that this is all the sites own content.

There are no mentions of sources or links to sources on the frontpage. When you click on a link, you are not brought to the source, but instead to another page on the site which republishes the content from the source in full. Again it looks like this is the sites own content.

If you scroll down below the fold you eventually find a link to source but on the articles I checked this just links the the source sites main page and not to the individual article at the source site.

FiReaNG3L
The links to the source are provided as is in the press releases (see my other comment) - I think they do this to boost Pagerank of their main site, not just the article.
FiReaNG3L
You misunderstand how the site works. I'm not republishing RSS feeds of any of the source on the site. The articles come from copyright-free press releases related to the news published by other sites (sometimes, their content is the copy-pasted press release, too, so that might have confused you).
anamax
Unless the source explicitly made those articles public domain (or they're older than Mickey Mouse), those articles are copyrighted. (No, the absence of a copyright notice doesn't mean that they're copyright-free.)
FiReaNG3L
You don`t seem to understand the very concept of a press release.
josefresco
I wouldn't say the value of TC is traffic, but more so an introduction to the VC/Tech community. TC posts so much each day that your post will be bumped off the front page in no time. However if just the right person is reading TC or picking up the feed, it can lead to good things for your startup.

Also, the posts that really seem to draw comments and the most buzz are all about the titans of the industry (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MS) They don't exactly need the PR but that's what people love to discuss and rant about.

mindcrime
TC demands to go first, eh? Feh... remind me to not submit anything to TC then. That's just pathetic. Mashable or CenterNetworks or any (and all) of a bazillion other blogs cover the same space to varying degrees anyway.
jeffreyc
Have you looked at Calais 2.0 as a data source for your site? It's Reuters venture into the Semantic Web, and its free content complete with tags so you can filter science-related items. (http://www.opencalais.com/)
brandonkm
The supposed tech crunch effect is massively overrated. imo. While being featured in TC is pretty exciting for any startup, the sudden spike in traffic that results is almost never long lasting.
flipbrad
i think it's actually quite a sensible policy, to reduce echo.