For about six years now, technology blogs like TechCrunch ad Mashable have been the go-to-place, to find the most up to date information that comes out of Silicon Valley and the technology world.
After many high profile acqusitions of these tech blogs, and the daily pressures of "churnalism", these tech blogs have become the go to place to get information that doesn't exist.
After reading the story of one of the few journalists in the space, Caleb Garling (@CalebGarling), Analytics firm AppData pollutes web with sketchy Instagram info:
A couple weeks after a concentrated uproar over Instagram’s privacy policies — which were largely pointless anyway — analytics outfit AppData has told the New York Post that its data shows users are fleeing the service because of the terms of service announcement. The company’s data showed that Instagram peaked at 16.4 million active daily users the week it rolled out its policy change had now plummeted to 12.4 million as of Thursday.
I went to dig up my own numbers. According to ChurnData Systems LLC (link unavailble), the leading providing of fictitous numbers for Silicon Valley, Techcrunch, ReadWrite, Mashable and others have lost 50% of their readership due to lack of actual journalism, ethics, while also consistently reporting on meaningless or completely made up stories.
While I stopped following any of the mainstream blogs in 2011, it looks like the mainstream is waking up to the fact that you shouldn't get your tech news from these sources.
