Over the past several years AnandTech has grown to be much more than just a PC hardware review site. In fact, we consider ourselves to be just as much about the new mobile world as we do about the old PC world. We leveraged our understanding of component and system architecture in bringing a deeper, more analytical look to mobile silicon and devices. As we continued to invest in our mobile coverage and expertise, we found that readers, mobile component and device makers responded quite well to our approach.
AnandTech’s focus grew, but we quickly ran into a bottleneck when it came time to monetize that mobile content. Our mobile content did a great job of helping to grow the site (as well as bring new eyeballs to our traditional PC coverage as well). While we had no issues competing with larger corporate owned sites on the content front, when it came to advertising we were at a disadvantage. Our advantage in quality allowed us to make progress, but ultimately it became a numbers game. The larger corporate owned sites could show up with a network of traffic, substantially larger than what AnandTech could deliver, and land more lucrative advertising deals than we were able to. They could then in turn fund a larger editorial operation and the cycle continues.
AnandTech has been profitable since its inception; it’s been on a great growth curve these past couple of years and we’ve always been able to do more with less, but lately there’s been an increased investment in high quality content. It wasn’t that long ago where the only type of content seeing real investment was shallow, poorly researched and ultimately very cable-TV-news-like. More recently however we’ve seen a shift. Higher quality content is being valued and some big names (both on the publishing and VC fronts) have been investing in them. Honestly we haven’t seen a world like this in probably over a decade.
Before his departure, Anand spent almost a year meeting with all of the big names in the publishing space, both traditional and new media players. The goal was to find AnandTech a home with a partner that had a sustainable business model (similar to AnandTech’s), but could add the investment and existing reach to allow the site to better realize its potential. That search led to a number of interesting potential partners; it was a refreshing experience to say the least knowing that there are groups in the world who really value good content. Ultimately that search brought AnandTech to Purch.
Purch met the requirements: they have a sustainable business model, are profitable and have the sort of reach AnandTech needs to really hit the next level. More fundamentally however, Purch’s values are in line with AnandTech’s. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that Purch acquired one of AnandTech’s biggest competitors in the late 1990s: Tom’s Hardware. Purch had already demonstrated a value for the sort of deep, long form content AnandTech was known for. In meeting with the Purch business and editorial teams, there was a clear interest in further developing AnandTech’s strengths as well as feeding back AnandTech’s learnings into the rest of the Purch family.
AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware remain editorially independent, and though no longer competitors, the goal is to learn from one another. To further invest in the areas that make us different, and together with the rest of the Purch family help to bring a higher standard of quality to the web.
The AnandTech team is staying in place and will continue to focus on existing coverage areas. We’re not changing our editorial policies or analytical approach and have no intentions of doing so. The one thing that will change is our ability to continue to grow the site. This if anything starts from the top; with a publisher to more directly handle the business of AnandTech, this frees me up to spend more time on content creation and helping the rest of our editors put together better articles. And in a hands-on business like journalism that benefit cannot be overstated.
AnandTech was an incredibly powerful force as an independent publisher, but it now joins a family whose combined traffic is eight times larger than what AnandTech was on its own. Our goal is to continue to invest in what we feel is the right approach to building high quality content; now we have an even greater ability to do just that.
345 Comments
View All Comments
Luscious - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
"If anyone reads this and thinks they could do a better job at writing articles, by all means write something and submit it to Ryan, Ian, or me."LOL I have done that in the past... and received only radio silence.
Proper spelling, grammar, technical knowledge and journalistic integrity no longer matter. My computer knowledge spans close to three decades, and have been writing full-time for almost seven years. I started my own website back in 2008 because I believed I could offer something that I saw was missing at the time - hands-on information, critical reviews and honest, unbiased, expert opinion. Articles written by an enthusiast, for the enthusiast, with detailed, specific, niche information. Not the marketing hype echoed by the tech media elite, nor the lies spread on endless forum threads by dubious posters.
No, I don't want to be "some guy on YouTube", there are plenty of those already. There will be things that you just cannot cover in a five minute video, that's where I appreciate guys like TTL. But even he still relies on written content, and owns his own website.
The downfall happens when some rich guy who's last written piece was his term paper in high-school tells the minimum-wage English grad who thinks a pot is something you keep in the garden to write a motherboard review. Meanwhile, the guys who have been elbow-deep tinkering with their overclocks see the end result and think to themselves WTF.
Michael Bay - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
"Several of the editors are in school as well"Way to shoot oneself in the foot.
akula2 - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
I reckon selling it to Purch was a pretty bad idea because the company will become too big which would be detrimental for the Hardware folks in some ways. Anyway, it's happened so it's past.It was quite a great journey to be immensely proud of. My best wishes to AT staff.
milleron - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Uh . . . Ryan . . . Don't you mean "in a hands-on business like journalism, that benefit cannot be OVERstated?"Ryan Smith - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Aww jeeze.Yes, you are correct. Thank you for pointing that out.
WeUmina - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
"LOL I have done that in the past... and received only radio silence."It probably wasn't very good then...
Luscious - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Or maybe you cannot put a price on honest, unbiased, expert opinion... You would be surprised at some of the offers I have received. At least I don't pretend to run a bakery with sugar-coated articles.WeUmina - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Or it wasn't very good.maximumGPU - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
you think he'd ever face up to that? of course not.He didn't hear anything back because "you cannot put a price on expert opinion..".
Luscious - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
You are very wrong there - I can take constructive criticism. The irony is being told you're over qualified when there are some really shitty writers out there.