MediaWatch: Mashable Is On A Tear - Continues To Widen Its Lead Over TechCrunch And Others

Posted by Tom Foremski - October 30, 2009

Compete.com provides a rough guide to the traffic of various sites, it's usually on the low side because of the way it collects its metrics but it does provide a good indication of trends.

Over the past year Mashable has been doing very well especially compared to the tech news sector leader TechCrunch.

A year ago TechCrunch had 660,000 more monthly visitors than Mashable (1.63m versus 0.96m). The most recent figures for 09/2009 show Mashable has grown 171% and overtook TechCrunch in May.

Mashable now has 43% more monthly visitors (2.62m versus 1.83m). According to Compete, TechCrunch traffic has been declining since June, and is down by about 10%.

TechCrunch is likely making more money than Mashable, at least for now. Mashable is using the Federated Media (FM) ad network. FM takes a large cut from advertising revenues plus it is selling ads based on prior lower Mashable traffic counts.

TechCrunch dropped FM about six months ago and thus can collect a higher ad revenue. (BTW GigaOm also dropped FM and now uses IDG ad network.)

Here is a graph of Techcrunch and Mashable's performance over the past year plus a look at ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, and GigaOm.