You cannot improve what you don’t measure
When TechCrunch switched from one analytics package to another, it stopped being a newsroom and became a product.
For context: This is a draft of a TechCrunch+ post I wrote June 9, 2023, in a pique of frustration when TechCrunch switched from one piece of analytics software to another. I never submitted it to the editors, but I thought back on it today and regretted that decision. TechCrunch+ is the now-defunct subscription part of TechCrunch. In retrospect, it coincided closely with when a lot of shifted at the publication.
When TechCrunch switched from Parsely to Marfeel, it stopped being a newsroom, and it became a product.
Hear me out.
The old analytics tool, Parsley, is a tool for content analytics. That makes sense, given the site's context: Techcrunch is the home for news and analysis of the universe of startups: the VCs that feed them, the markets and regulations that try to kill them, the corporates they cozy up with, and the prerequisite navel-gazing and intellectual hi-jinx that comes with it.
The new analytics tool, Marfeel, is a tool for dispensing superglue across the internet to attract as many sticky eyeballs as you can. The company’s website celebrates Audience, Engagement, and Conversions (to newsletters, paid subscribers, etc). That makes sense, all of this sounds really awesome:
… If you work in marketing. As a writer or editor, none of that lands; it’s almost entirely irrelevant to the entire operation of a newsroom.
As a company, you need to have a successful monetization strategy, and turning internet visitors into advertising clicks, newsletter subscriptions, and TechCrunch+ subscribers is how the business stays alive, people keep their jobs, and contractors like yours sincerely continue to get paid.
// TechCrunch + Paywall goes here
Look, I get all of that, but the problem is that TechCrunch, for all its silliness, is a relatively solid source of news. We have reporters. We get scoops. We break stories. We go behind the news and want to make the world a bit better, just like you. Yes, you, reading this story and asking yourself if I broke the fourth wall in an article. Yes, I did, and this is behind the paywall, so it’s just you and me, buddy. You know you paid money to read this, so here it is.
In September a year and a half or so ago, TechCrunch’s parent company, Verizon Media, was bought by Apollo, and then, earlier this year, laid off 23% of its staff on the digital advertising side of the business. What happened to TechCrunch’s editorial budget? I don’t know, but we haven’t had to sustain layoffs thus far. [Update: TechCrunch suffered editorial layoffs between me writing this post and publishing it]. I have no particular knowledge of who decided to move to a different metrics platform — it’s above my pay grade. What I do know is that as a business, something has shifted.
As a site, TechCrunch is now run by growth metrics. If I ask Marfeel, it has three alternatives, AI-powered suggestions for making that growth metrics post perform better:
- “5 key metrics for DTC startups to track growth”
- “Growth marketing for startups: Which metrics to focus on.”
- “From Uber to Postmates: Key metrics for growth marketing”.
Catchy, right?
The problem is that as reporters, we need certain things from our metrics tool as well. For example, until recently, I wrote the Daily Crunch newsletter alongside Christine Hall. More recently, I have been writing the Startups Weekly newsletter. For both, it would be helpful to be able to say “Show me all posts published in the last 7 days, sorted by most readers”. Or perhaps “What were the most-read stories published on Monday last week? Wildly enough, there’s no obvious way to do that. If you want to filter to all posts that are available from Monday to Friday, you have to manually select “2023–09–05,” “2023–09–06,” “2023–09–07,” “2023–09–08” and “2023–09–09.” Notice how tedious it was to read that? Yeah, getting the data to put together something as simple as a newsletter is not less tedious.
When we first made the shift to the new tool, I was upset because, as a writer, I felt it was vastly inferior to Parseley.
But then it clicked into place: this isn’t a tool for me; this is a tool for other people, the ones who are optimizing the site for profitability and efficiency.
As a startup, you can learn something here: aligning your vision with your mission is crucial. Measure what you want to accomplish, and then double down on improving those numbers. The tools you use — and the metrics you focus on — matter hugely in the process. That’s how your stakeholders (investors, shareholders, and, well, everyone, really) measure your success.
So when your metrics switch from helping journalists to helping advertisers, you know that there’s been a shift in the organization. We will leave it to the readers to figure out if it is for the good or not.
