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.
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Hairs_ - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
I hope that this new deal allows the site to expand as it needs to. Anandtech is in a league of its own quality-wise for reviews of anything it addresses, and always has been.As mentioned above, the pace of change in the PC sector has slowed to a crawl, which coupled with Anandtech's in-depth approach isn't helpful from the point of generating "launch day" content. Perhaps a change into more long-term testing, reliability-based reviews etc could solve that. Widening the scope of testing could also help, I've mentioned more than once that reviews of *genuine* low-end or mid-range hardware is sadly lacking in practically all areas of the site, with motherboards and RAM reviews particularly standing out. Motherboard reviews seem to assume that $200 is "midrange" at this stage. At the moment we've got x99 and 10GbitE motherboards being reviewed, but there's nothing on the apparent slew of H and B series motherboards that will overclock even though they're not officially supposed to. "Roundup" reviews where multiple competitors of the same type also seem to have gone by the wayside.
Editorially, I think everyone is on the same page that: Tom's Hardware is a site full of junk reviews which offer nothing whatsoever to Anandtech in terms of "learning". I wouldn't even trust Tom's to have benchmark donkey-work farmed out to them.
Creig - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
"The company (Purch) helps marketers achieve their branding and performance objectives in a high-quality, brand-safe context. Its sites connect in-market shoppers with more than 7,000 marketers and sellers, driving industry-leading conversion rates and $1 billion in commerce transactions annually."A marketing firm has purchased AnandTech? Get ready to be bombarded with ads on every page.
araczynski - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
i've been with anandtech & tom's hardware for many many years (lurking/reading mostly). stopped going to tom's a few years back when it became a cesspool of ads.what happens here is yet to be seen, hopefully it doesn't devolve into merely yet another ad-delivery mechanism like 99% of websites.
there's always ars/engadget/slashdot for good birds-eye-view of the sector, but not much left for the ground level view.
Michael Bay - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Slashdot is only good for loonix circlejerking.cknobman - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Already removed the daily news feed from the homepage. That and the articles were the main reasons I came here.Didn't take 2 days to start screwing a good thing up, nice.
LtGoonRush - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Tragic news, as I've been following the site for over half of my life. I had hoped that the site might find a way to continue after Anand's departure, but I suppose it was always unlikely that it would survive the loss of that much talent in such a short time. It's just especially disappointing to see it sold to a garbage content farm company.pwr4wrd - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
End of an era as we know it, which started with Anand's departure.Red Dawn - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Well let's hope Anand made some serious banksuperflex - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
So long Anandtech.You used to be a great resource on computer hardware.
Now you've gone full retard.
Getting rid of Brian Klug was strike 1.
Selling out to Purch is a weak line out to the pitcher.
You wont be missed. Deleting the shortcut from my browser after this is posted.
Good luck Ryan. You're gonna need it with all those shitty writers you have working for you.
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Thanks. Let me make another "crappy" comment for you to enjoy....First, "getting rid" is hardly what happened to Brian Klug. He had a great job opportunity and is likely making several times as much money as he could have made sticking with AT. As for Anand, he really was quite tired of all the travel and something a bit less chaotic is a nice change of pace. Think about how long he was doing the same thing, day after day, year after year -- and not as one of us crappy writers; he had to run the site as well. At one point he had a post saying something like, "This is the first vacation I've taken in ten years." I'm sure he earned plenty of money, but money as they say can't buy happiness.
So if you're thinking it's time to do something else, what do you do? You find a way to pass the torch to someone new, get out while you're still doing well and have a business worth buying. That's basically what happened. I realize this is the Internet, so every time there's a major announcement of change like this everyone likes to come out of the woodworks and proclaim the end of the world. That way if they're right, they can pay themselves on the head and say, "I told you so." And if they're wrong, as they usually are, they go back into hiding and wait for the next time to forecast a dire future.
The fact is that the people writing for AnandTech have not changed in the past several months. Everyone who was with AT when Anand retired is still alive and kicking. Reviews are still in progress, and delays sometimes happen. Several of the editors are in school as well, which inherently creates a slow down in output.
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. If you can string together a bunch of coherent sentences about technology and you are passionate about the subject, there's certainly room for adding people. Or you can continue to go around grumbling about the collapse of the site, lack of quality reviews, etc. because it's a lot easier to do that I suppose.