Who is winning the news site war? As the battle between EN24.com and TheMittani com continues, my opinion is that the former has stepped up its news reporting while dialing back the number of published syndicated blog posts, while the former's news reporting has dropped slightly but the number of guest "articles" has increased, articles that could be blog posts of their own.
I decided to look into the numbers on Google to see what some basic stats say:
The number of subscribers and posts per week are virtually identical, but the steadiness of the posting rate at TheMittani.com is obvious over the more erratic publishing at EN24.com.
Right now it feels like a dead heat. The question is, can Riverini and whatever help he has keep pace with the large staff TheMittani com boasts? Or will TheMittani com find its cluster sources drying up as interest wanes and it struggles to report news outside of the CFC?
Posts
Is there any reason that you use mittens.com instead of the correct themittani.com?
ReplyDeleteBeing a bit of an idiot, I have a lot of trouble spelling themittani correctly. No offense was intended; I should have taken more care but I'm also lazy. :P
ReplyDeleteThere, updated post to avoid any unintended offense.
ReplyDeleteIt might be your bias speaking, but he has never talked down on the blogs themselves. What he has done, is criticize EN24 for needing to syndicate blogs to have content in the first place.
ReplyDeletePersonally I subscribe to all the blogs I consider worthwhile as it is. During the thankfully short time I had the EN24 RSS in my reader, I was slightly annoyed every time a post was duplicated by arriving later in another feed. Which happened often, obviously.
How much of EN24's content is reposted/syndicated blogs? How much of TheMittani.com's content is original content?
ReplyDeleteThat's how I judge a winner. The winner is clearly themittani.com
That's a very bizarre criterion. Like judging who reports news best based on how many red-headed journalists they have. I don't see how where the content originates from really impacts the reader of the news site. Sure sometimes I glance at EN24 and realise it's a blog post I've already seen but most of it will be fresh to most of us. It's not like many readers read every single blog out there and also both news sites.
DeleteWho is winning the Eve news site war? Jester imo.
ReplyDeleteSo the question is which human authored site is winning the new war since Jester is clearly a robot?
DeleteI'm just glad to see 2 instead of one... no matter what side(s) you are on, nothing like having more views of everything.
ReplyDeleteI found this post pretty interesting. In the interests of full disclosure myself, I am a member of GSF these days and am an editor at TheMittani.com. I have also, in the past, had posts from my blog reposted on Evenews24.com.
ReplyDeleteI can see why some believe that it is a dead heat. TM.com is still very new (two months and some change old) whereas EN24 has been around seemingly forever. As your graphs indicate, roughly the same amount of posts are being put out, and to be fair to EN24 - they often scoop us, getting a post about a certain event out before we do.
That being said, the quantity doesn't really speak to the quality issue, which is really what TM.com is all about. We may take a little longer to get there, but when we do we try our damnedest to provide some actual insight into a particular issue; to get comments from both sides of a fight; to do our due diligence on a piece. This isn't a slam against the quality of the bloggers that get put on EN24. For others who may read this and not know who I am, I also run Evebloggers.com and the Eve Blog Pack, among other ventures in the blogging community. I love bloggers.
Re: the staff vs. one man show issue, to say that we have the bigger staff is true, but also misleading. We currently have a total of 30 contributors (27 writers and 3 editors), in varying levels of activity. Some haven't submitted a piece in weeks, others do two a week - you get the idea. This seems like a lot when compared to riverini's essentially solo act. However, we generate all original content, whereas nearly all of EN24's items come from one of three sources: bloggers, forum posts (kugu mainly), and dropbox submissions. In reality, he has a potential staff count well into triple digits.
Finally, TM.com is pretty new. We recently went through a round of firing/hiring to address areas in need. We picked up some highsec pvp representation (Iam Widdershins), faction warfare (Pinky Feldman), Nulli Secunda (a couple guys in fact), as well as expanded our coverage into games that Eve's demographic appreciates (MWO, WoT, Dust, Planetside 2). Our network of sources and representation from across the spectrum of Eve is only growing (and we would love to grow it more, if only the CFC's enemies could get their panties unwound).
I'll be curious to see where we are after six months of operation. And we welcome the seemingly renewed dedication that riverini has for Eve news - it should serve to spur us on quite a bit if he can keep it up.
I think you may be over-estimating your quality at times. Some Mittani.com writers are excellent - Mynna is my favourite, absolutely spot on about stuff most players don't really know or understand as well as him.
DeleteBut quite often it's something of a circle jerk. James315 seems to parrot 2 year old Ten Ton Hammer articles which is then followed by a frenzy of backslapping comments from people who agree with him. But it's not really a good objective analysis, simply an advocacy of a very niche gameplay style.
The danger for your site is sycophancy. Because you've started with a pre-built audience and often write articles that are preaching to the choir there's a real danger that you're not speaking to the wider Eve community, it's just Goons agreeing with Goons.
@Marc: In my case I never got the luxury of actually trusting people. Keep telling yourself I got a sort of three digits staff, I'll take that as a compliment. Your people is burning off, as so you will once you either a) realize you are building someone's else a business you won't get to participate the moment you decide to get a rest b) get into an argument with mgnt (which is extremely easy) or c) the novelty will wear off once that article you were pushing for gets published. Mittens has a long history of claiming credit for other people's effort and while some guys are cool with this freeloading, you don't even get to see a list of "staff" on that site.
ReplyDeleteEve News24 has always been a one man show for what turns to be a quite ungrateful hobby given Eve Online's "special" kind of crowd.
Whether Mittens.com is a competitor or not, that's debatable - I actually welcome competition since it drives innovation, so far all i have seen from your side is a reactive behavior rather than a proactive one. I get sent your numbers on a weekly from that "water cooler" thing so I actually know "how good" you guys doing.
Neither of us are a subscription based service, reason for which when that destitute litigant went on saying how "they were putting us out of business" I didn't even finch. What I will say is mittens.com is the final nail on EVE-Tribune coffin, although they were long dead already.
I don't think of EM23 and TM in terms of a news site war. The sites are not mutually exclusive and most players I know read both. Each site has strengths and weaknesses. In the long run the presence of each is of benefit to the other.
ReplyDeleteDelivering content to the Eve community, whether via a news site, podcast or blog, is a labor of love. The hours involved are often long, the rewards are few, and the expectations of the audience are high. It's not for the faint of heart.
With that in mind, props must be given to the community of editors, journalists, bloggers and podcasters that make up the Eve media community. Vive la différence.