Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?
There is no way to say this without sounding like a complainer, so I’m just going to say it and, well, sound like a complainer. And maybe I am so I’ll just embrace that and move on. K?
Oh, before I begin, let me just say that I’m completely open to the fact that I could be dead wrong with any of my thoughts below. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my thinking in the comments section.
TechCrunch doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot “digging” lately. It seems like, for a lack of a better way to put it, the TechCrunch editors need to be spoon fed stories rather than them hunting them down and finding them.
Maybe the volume of submissions that they get is such that they simply do not have time to go out and find any other stories. Or, maybe the fault lies on me, for not continuously emailing the editors or driving to their office and barging in, demanding that they cover various things going on at Viddler.
Or maybe they’re just like me. They only have 24 hours in a day and they need to focus on what does them the most good. Maybe they only cover Twitter, Yahoo!, and many other Silicon Valley-based companies because they’re far more interesting to their audience than Viddler’s new customizable player.
It could be that since I failed to go out and tell them about Viddler’s API, our business-to-business Web services, or our Vidgets - that they would have never known about them otherwise.
Let me be clear; I certainly don’t feel shunned by anyone at TechCrunch. In fact, all of my dealings with everyone there (past and present) has always been great. They’ve covered Viddler’s launch, and embedded our player on many occassion. They just don’t seem to be paying attention to some of the things happening over here on the east coast, and I’m wondering what we might be doing wrong.
Some have commented to me; “So long as your users know what is going on, you shouldn’t worry about the TechCrunch audience.” In some ways I agree with that statement, but we want everyone to know how great Viddler’s services are maturing to be - and we think that those that read TechCrunch deserve to know as much as Center Network’s readers.
I have seen many discussions about TechCrunch and its editors, good, bad, and downright ugly - I hope this post doesn’t come across as anything other than me being honest. I want the entire world to know about Viddler, and I believe TechCrunch to be an excellent technology blog/online magazine that could be instrumental in helping us achieve that goal. It just isn’t doing so right now.
Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?
(The above post also relates to any one or any company that covers the technology space. Let me know of other outlets that should be covering Viddler that aren’t and I’ll try to contact them.)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I agree with your points and observations, Colin. I read TechCrunch’s RSS feed on my iPhone every morning and it seems more and more they’re just covering stuff going on in the Valley. Granted there’s a lot going on there, but for the average TC reader, there’s a lot more interesting things going on in other parts of the tech world.
I’m not seeing the other video sites putting a lot of development into their business models or allowing the kind of customizations like Viddler is. For us “users” out here, that kind of information is much more interesting and useful than the latest ramblings and complaining about Twitter, Seesmic, or other friends of the TC staff.
Like you said, TC does a great job and there’s just so much going on these days to cover it all. But as Viddler continues to innovate while other video hosting companies are dropping off the radar, that would seem to be very news worthy to me.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:44 am
I also agree with everything you and Shane said.
Sometimes you just can’t expect people to ’see’ things. For example, I consider myself to be quite the viddler junkie and did not know about the B2B stuff or Vigets. I guess I should spend more time looking at the bottom of viddler.com or pay closer attention to the blog.
IMO, if you want someone to know about what the hot new features are, you should really put something about them at the *top* of the page, not bury them in the page footer where most people won’t see them. Then, draft a release and send it to every tech site you can find. If they don’t post it, send it until they do.
And, if you want coverage, sometimes you have to hammer people with emails, jump up and down, yell, scream and beg for it to happen. At least that’s what I’ve noticed. Always remember, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
BTW, nice work the blog redo. Very very cool!
August 28th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
db: Noted. And I agree with you exactly.