Why Mashable flamed out
Funny how everyone talks like Mashable lost to Techcrunch. Look up how much TC got acquired for, it&#x27;s actually less than what Mashable got acquired for.<p>What REALLY happened was not that Mashable failed. It&#x27;s that the entire journalism sector failed. Mashable is just a good mascot and sacrificial lamb because it&#x27;s actually one of the most well known ones.<p>I say Mashable is a &quot;mascot&quot; because they represent exactly what&#x27;s wrong with &quot;journalism&quot; nowadays. Instead of producing what people should read, they have shifted their focus onto:<p>1. What people will click (Memes, controversial topics, content about other people&#x27;s misfortune)
2. What advertisers will pay more for (Video)<p>It&#x27;s understandable because it&#x27;s been a while since &quot;content&quot; became commoditized. Now media sites no longer can differentiate themselves with content anymore and they can&#x27;t figure out how to, so they just do what makes them money in the short term.<p>This article also inevitably mentions Buzzfeed, which I think is what Mashable would have been if it didn&#x27;t have to go through all the trial and error. Buzzfeed probably learned a lot from Mashable&#x27;s mistakes and decided to go all in on &quot;I don&#x27;t care about quality, I&#x27;ll give you what you want, just give us ad money&quot;.<p>But those who&#x27;ve been following the media landscape also know that that model&#x27;s not been working out either (It&#x27;s a good thing that it&#x27;s not).<p>So my take is, they didn&#x27;t flame out because of all these little reasons. They were just the symptoms. The real reason was because they have lost their soul. It&#x27;s not only Mashable that flamed out, it&#x27;s that the entire media industry that is flaming out, and OP&#x27;s own publication will probably flame out too, if they keep writing crap like this (I personally think all publications that monetize off of someone else&#x27;s misfortunes deserve to taste their own drug and die off too)<p>Oh, by the way, this is nothing new, and is definitely not just because of the Internet. If you read up on the history of the media itself, you&#x27;ll realize this type of pendulum swing between &quot;quality content&quot; vs. &quot;shallow, give people what they want in exchange for revenue&quot; approaches have existed several times already.