Okay, I'll admit it, I visit and read TechCrunch.com and Mashable.com almost daily. They both are leading technology blogs that do an excellent job providing breaking news, product reviews and insightful opinions. I probably won't share these details when out to dinner with a group of friends but in this article I'll share my secret of reading both websites more often then I should or is necessary. With a couple million unique visitors per month reaching each website I know, at least per the statistics of Compete.com, that I am not alone in being a technology blog reading nerd.
TechCrunch has long been the largest and most popular technology blog around, almost since founder Michael Arrington launched TechCrunch on June 11, 2005 they splashed onto the technology blog scene and started creating a large following and buzz. However, Mashable founder Pete Mashmore launched shortly after on July 2005 and has been in seemingly intense competition with TechCrunch ever since. Both websites often posting similar stories within minutes of each other, adopting new virtual marketing methods and so on.
I started digging into various statistics for both websites and came across some interesting facts that potentially places Mashable as being slightly more popular than TechCrunch in regards to overall monthly unique visitors. Of course the statistics are not exhaustive and from a critic's point-of-view not conclusive, but they are facts nonetheless and do provide a general overview of the current popularity challenge between Mashable and TechCrunch.
Lets explore...
Compete.com, leading web analytics company that's a unit of TNS Media, displays an interesting graph reporting Mashable with slightly more unique visitors than TechCrunch for the first time during May 2009, (1,899,380 unique visitors for Mashable versus 1,862,612 unique visitors for TechCrunch). Compete.com further reports that Mashable's unique visitor growth over TechCrunch intensified during the month of June 2009, (2,099,929 unique visitors for Mashable versus 2,033,949 unique visitors for TechCrunch).
Even though these statistics show some potentially interesting facts not all web analytic companies are reporting in such favor of Mashable versus TechCrunch. Veteran company Alexa.com, an Amazon.com company, reports TechCrunch as the 676 most visited website on the Internet and Mashable.com at a trailing rank of 784. Alexa also reports that TechCrunch reaches a larger percentage of overall global users than Mashable and also has a higher amount of daily pageviews per unique visitor.
Statistics continues to look in TechCrunch's favor when exploring the Top 100 most popular blog list from leading blog search engine Technorati. Technorati firmly displays TechCrunch's position at number two with Mashable's position just recently edging into third place. However, please note that Mashable has done one hell of an impression job ripping up Technorati's Top 100 blog list and reaching the third position is a very impressive endeavor to accomplish.
Maybe one of the more interesting facts is that despite TechCrunch's enormous lead in claimed RSS subscribers versus Mashable's, which is at a whopping 2,935,000 subscribers versus 288,000 subscribers respectively and regardless of the other statistics outlined above is the reality that Mashable has significantly more Twitter followers than Techcrunch. With a larger global audience reach and significantly more RSS subscribers why is TechCrunch showing 1,010,461 Twitter followers versus Mashable's 1,202,378 Twitter followers? And what impact with this have on Mashable overtaking TechCrunch as the Internet's more popular technology blog in the future?
Maybe Mashable has more Twitter followers as a result of acquiring blippr, a leading micro-review service provider, in March 2009 and blippr users are also on Twitter and therefore follow Mashable in greater quantities. Maybe its because Mashable reports on Twitter more often than TechCrunch and when content related to Twitter is searched for Mashable's postings show up in greater quantity than TechCrunch. Maybe not?
Either way, something definitely positive is happening for Mashable overall and specifically on Twitter and TechCrunch better take notice. It's an impressive accomplishment to have nearly 3 million RSS subscribers but reading breaking news via RSS feeds versus Twitter could start to become something more and more of the past. Twitter is in the here and now, they are the new popular medium for reading and discovering about breaking news, they are where's its at and Mashable is thus far winning the Twitter follower battle.
Things happen fast on the Internet and even faster regarding technology on the Internet. It will be interesting to see where the Mashable versus TechCrunch race is at in the near future.
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