Breaking Down News: The Next Wave

The rise and fall of Gigaom looks like a harmonic of the waveform of tech media.

Gigaom, the leading blog for cutting edge technologies founded by St Stephen’s alumnus Om Malik, has been taken down to runlevel 0. It had blazed skywards like a rocket through the latter half of the 2000s and, when it flatlined for want of funds on Monday, it claimed a readership of 6.4 million. “Goodnight sweetheart, I still love you!” Malik wrote in a moving post on his own blog, om.co.

The rise and fall of Gigaom looks like a harmonic of the waveform of tech media as it evolved from the Nineties to the present. In the beginning, when the visual web became mainstream in India, there was a peak of publishing activity in print media. In the US, it produced Wired, which remains an iconic brand. In India, old war horses like Dataquest and Electronics for You, which had started as an IT industry watcher and a hobbyist’s magazine, respectively, expanded their scope. Soon enough, though, the need to report the internet in print diminished as digital media gained credibility, and reputations were made online. Gigaom was one of several one-man shows that took off in the early 21st century.

As bad memories of the dotcom bust faded, the IT industry diversified rapidly. It became impossible for a single human to have insights on everything from venture capital to memory fragmentation. In response, institutions like Techsupportalert.com, a resource for people who wanted free software but hesitated to leave Windows behind, became volunteer-driven. Gigaom took a corporate turn and became a media company. But it stood apart from the mainstream, which is ad-supported and therefore focused on increasing page views and clickthroughs. Instead, it diversified from Web news into industry events and sold the work of a pool of researchers. In an industry where “research” has occasionally been a euphemism for bogus marketing claims — the dotcom boom was the cumulative result — it maintained a reputation for probity. The perception was that Gigaom did not allow researchers to be leaned on by the corporates who paid it.

Fairly excellent model, so why did it suddenly run dry? The US tech press is still feeling its way through the ballpark but the most credible answer seems to be: venture capital. Gigaom took $22 million in VC funding over several years, and perhaps its demise signals that it isn’t as good for media as it is for product developers. The desires of an app maker, its user base and the VC behind the project more or less overlap — it’s win-win, rah-rah, happy-happy, boom-boom. Media produces divergence. A VC may not want to hear bad news about sectors and products they’re betting on, while a reader thinks it’s crucial information.

But perhaps this conflict of interest was not the main story in the case of Gigaom; perhaps it was actually the need for speed. Venture capital is fast money. It wants returns in two or three years. Media, on the contrary, is a slow business and can take up to a decade to balance its books. Digital media is faster than print, of course, but it can only be pushed so far.

While competitors like Techcrunch are doing well, Gigaom’s unexpected demise is occasioning speculation on the future of technology media. In the last decade, the tech blog bit deep into the market that print media had once ruled. Will the blog now cede room to a competing publishing format? Personally speaking, I find myself using online forums to pursue the kind of information that was supplied by commentators and critics earlier. They’re crowdsourced and cost almost nothing to run, and could form the core of the next wave in technology media.

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com