Attract a large number of executives and VCs techmeme how to become the science and technology industry must read news site?

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Summary] Techmeme attracts a large number of tech executives and venture capitalists. Zuckerberg is also one of the faithful readers.

Bi Chinese station April 8 report

Over the past 10 years, the technology industry has evolved from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to photo-sharing apps like Instagram.

We anticipate that there will be some other changes on the way to the technology industry.

However, as a must-read site for a technology industry, Techmeme has long maintained its status unchanged.

High-tech industry is making rapid progress. Only two-year-old companies were bought at billions of-dollar price-think WhatsApp, Oculus Rift and nest. The next big trend may occur in the blink of an eye. What Techmeme does is provide links to other news sites, such as the Drudge Report (Drudge) or Google News (Google News), and why can it achieve such success?

Techmeme's founder, Gabu Rivilla Gabe Rivera, told Business Insider,facebook chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) was a loyal reader of Techmeme. Techmeme also attracted a large group of Google's top executives and venture capitalists.

"I view it several times a day. "Boxgroup Management partner, TechStars New York co-founder David Tichy David Tisch, told Business Insider in an e-mail. "This is the easiest way to ensure that you don't miss important industry news." Skimming the headlines is a great way to get big news summaries. ”

But for other peers, Techmeme is considered a backup.

"I've been looking at it a few times a day, but now it's just launch ticker's backup, and we'll rewrite its headlines, study and remove duplicate content in order to simplify it." "Launch Ticker and inside.com founder Jason Caracanis (Jason Calacanis) told Business Insider by e-mail. "Generally speaking, you don't need 15 links to the same news. ”

Techmeme was founded in 2005 without any external investors. Now, Techmeme has become a popular place for all the science and technology news. Over the years, a bunch of techmeme "killer" and cloning sites have sprung up. But Rivera says Techmeme's biggest competitor is blogs and social networking sites such as Twitter.

Business Insider Recent interviews with Vera to see how he made Techmeme so successful.

Techmeme founder Gabu Rivilla (Gabe Rivera)

Here is Business Insider reporter and Rivera Dialogue (slightly changed):

Business Insider (hereinafter referred to as BI): How did you get into the media industry from the IT industry?

Gabe Rivera (GR): I have always been interested in the news. About 10 years ago, I became particularly fascinated by how early blogs converged on exclusive news and commentary. So I saw an opportunity to create a Web site with a style similar to Google News and bringing together influential commentators and journalists to discuss the content of their blogs. Techmeme was initially fully automated and, to a large extent, a "technology" product, it took a while to gain media capabilities to stay alive. So now I would say that we inhabit the media world and are also high-tech-oriented companies.

BI: How does it become a must-read site for the technology industry?

GR: It's gradually done this. At first, Techmeme focused on the content of early tech blogs. As these blogs become more independent and feature Web 2.0, Techmeme is also heading in this direction.

But the collection of various forms has enabled us to gain more audiences. The first is a collection of blogs: Many popular independent blogs become "pros," and the oldest media sites become more blogging. This is accompanied by a collection of our products. In the iphone era, the success of the hardware is linked to excellent software, and the application is linked to the cloud, and we have to be like now covering a broad area: hardware and software, web and local applications, business and consumer, people and products, business and core technology, in short, the entire technology industry.

Fortunately, in the course of our change, our early readers have been with us and helped to gain a wider audience.

BI: Over the years, several techmeme "killer" and clone sites have emerged. How do you guarantee Techmeme's position in the technology industry? Techmeme What other competitors do not have? Speaking of competitors, which one do you like best? Or, which opponent tries to replicate you to the fullest extent?

GR: There have been clones of us, especially in the early days, Techmeme's automation and simple interfaces have led some developers to mistakenly believe that cloning can be made in just two weeks. Those clones are usually quickly closed. They either take a long time to get on the news, or they often miss important news.

In recent years, the real competition has not come from direct competitors, but from social networks and news blogs, which can also provide a "front page of technology news". These rivals may have robbed some readers. However, there are good reasons why the best and brightest readers still have to visit techmeme.

Take Twitter. If you choose the right mix of news media, you can quickly get quite a wide range of tech news. But you still have a problem with noise (too many tweets) and a hierarchy (it's hard to get the biggest news of the day quickly). Techmeme solves both problems because we only provide a link for one news and we put the biggest news on top of the page.

Now look at the blog. Many blogs do well in the coverage of the technology news, and usually solve the noise problem I mentioned above, and sometimes even partially solve the problem of news grade. But Techmeme's readers also appreciate the combination of our news sources. If everyone is talking about an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal today, or medium a persuasive analysis, or Mark Zuckerberg's posting on Facebook, our readers will want to see the highlighted links instead of rewriting the news. At the same time, people like our curatorial news mix. This is the result of our five years of building a great editorial team and the result of our more than 10-year commitment to news aggregation technology.

BI: You've never used any venture capital, why? Do you think you will never accept venture capital? Have venture capitalists approached you, hoping to invest in Techmeme?

GR: We have never accepted any venture capital. Before I got the ad revenue, I just had some savings, and then we started getting revenue from the sponsors and we were going to be there.

When we first launched, there were a lot of VCs who contacted us. I think they saw what we were doing and what we were looking for. But for some good reason (related to technology and market), we have not accepted any venture capital. Still, many venture capitalists have reiterated that they are still interested in our company if we are prepared to accept venture capital.

Will we accept venture capital in the future? I don't rule out that possibility. Although we are currently self-sufficient, our core business model is changing. If we have a clear idea of how to expand properly and our finances are not sufficient to allow us to develop at a faster rate, we will seek venture capital. However, this will not happen in the short term.

How is bi:techmeme profitable?

GR: We are profitable, but it is not worth showing off. In other words, our income is not significant. Part of the reason is that our only income comes from advertising. And, so far, we have stubbornly insisted on doing only beautiful ads that are published in an elegant manner that respects the reader, never releasing giant banner ads.

Bi:techmeme How much news is collected automatically and how many are planned by people?

Richter: This is hard to answer because there is a tight feedback loop between our automated operations and our human editors. Techmeme and Mediagazer's top headlines are now often edited, and our editors frequently sift through automated collection of posts before releasing the news. Although those two-level links (links to "more:") are usually collected automatically, editors can modify them.

So I usually just say "half to half", but it's actually hard to quantify.

BI: I'm also curious about which of the same media flows the most after techmeme?

GR: After Techmeme is Memeorandum, the site is still not edited by human. And then Mediagazer.

BI: You mentioned that Techmeme is still evolving. Can you explain that?

GR: Most of our improvements are under the page: Better editing processes, smarter algorithms, better news. Our interface has improved and some outward-expanding functionality has been developed, but progress has been slow. We don't want to change too suddenly. For example, we are improving our rankings to make it more useful.

We have also launched some new services to the enterprise, and opened up some new sources of advertising revenue. For example, more and more companies are organizing their activities around their products and platforms, and it is clear that the world needs a place to focus on these activities, and techmeme can be such a place. Similarly, we provide a place for businesses to promote recruitment.

BI: And, Techmeme, how many independent visitors are there each month? What is the change of techmeme flow over the years? Is it increasing, decreasing or maintaining relative stability?

GR: Monthly independent visitors are a particularly bad measure for news aggregation sites like Techmeme. A 10,000-regular readership site, whose articles could be shared by 10 million people on Twitter or Facebook within one months, could claim 10 million independent visitors. (Think of Upworthy, viral Nova and other sites, this scenario is not too weird.) For news aggregation sites like Techmeme, there are no articles or comment pages, and monthly independent visitors are regular readers with numbers still below 1 million. But we do not want to give specific data to prevent people from comparing it to other types of websites. After the rapid growth of the first few years, our traffic is still increasing, but the speed is flat.

BI: Which Silicon Valley stars are your readers?

Richter: I know Mark Zuckerberg is one of our loyal readers. As I have said, a large number of Google executives are also our readers, Google Vice President Pice (Sundar Pichai) last year at Google's Web developers annual meeting mentioned our website. Various posts on Twitter suggest that many of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are our readers, including PayPal's president.

BI: How long will you run Techmeme? Do you ever get bored?

Richter: I think our job has to do with a lot of fun, fun, and difficult questions. So, in the next few years, I look forward to maximizing the range of our products, which is a fascinating thing. So I want to work for techmeme as long as possible.

BI: Have you ever thought about becoming a venture capitalist? Would you like to be a venture capitalist?

Richter: I think what I do now will make me happier than VC. (Tan S Compilation)