Over the past several years AnandTech has grown to be much more than just a PC hardware review site. In fact, we consider ourselves to be just as much about the new mobile world as we do about the old PC world. We leveraged our understanding of component and system architecture in bringing a deeper, more analytical look to mobile silicon and devices. As we continued to invest in our mobile coverage and expertise, we found that readers, mobile component and device makers responded quite well to our approach.
AnandTech’s focus grew, but we quickly ran into a bottleneck when it came time to monetize that mobile content. Our mobile content did a great job of helping to grow the site (as well as bring new eyeballs to our traditional PC coverage as well). While we had no issues competing with larger corporate owned sites on the content front, when it came to advertising we were at a disadvantage. Our advantage in quality allowed us to make progress, but ultimately it became a numbers game. The larger corporate owned sites could show up with a network of traffic, substantially larger than what AnandTech could deliver, and land more lucrative advertising deals than we were able to. They could then in turn fund a larger editorial operation and the cycle continues.
AnandTech has been profitable since its inception; it’s been on a great growth curve these past couple of years and we’ve always been able to do more with less, but lately there’s been an increased investment in high quality content. It wasn’t that long ago where the only type of content seeing real investment was shallow, poorly researched and ultimately very cable-TV-news-like. More recently however we’ve seen a shift. Higher quality content is being valued and some big names (both on the publishing and VC fronts) have been investing in them. Honestly we haven’t seen a world like this in probably over a decade.
Before his departure, Anand spent almost a year meeting with all of the big names in the publishing space, both traditional and new media players. The goal was to find AnandTech a home with a partner that had a sustainable business model (similar to AnandTech’s), but could add the investment and existing reach to allow the site to better realize its potential. That search led to a number of interesting potential partners; it was a refreshing experience to say the least knowing that there are groups in the world who really value good content. Ultimately that search brought AnandTech to Purch.
Purch met the requirements: they have a sustainable business model, are profitable and have the sort of reach AnandTech needs to really hit the next level. More fundamentally however, Purch’s values are in line with AnandTech’s. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that Purch acquired one of AnandTech’s biggest competitors in the late 1990s: Tom’s Hardware. Purch had already demonstrated a value for the sort of deep, long form content AnandTech was known for. In meeting with the Purch business and editorial teams, there was a clear interest in further developing AnandTech’s strengths as well as feeding back AnandTech’s learnings into the rest of the Purch family.
AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware remain editorially independent, and though no longer competitors, the goal is to learn from one another. To further invest in the areas that make us different, and together with the rest of the Purch family help to bring a higher standard of quality to the web.
The AnandTech team is staying in place and will continue to focus on existing coverage areas. We’re not changing our editorial policies or analytical approach and have no intentions of doing so. The one thing that will change is our ability to continue to grow the site. This if anything starts from the top; with a publisher to more directly handle the business of AnandTech, this frees me up to spend more time on content creation and helping the rest of our editors put together better articles. And in a hands-on business like journalism that benefit cannot be overstated.
AnandTech was an incredibly powerful force as an independent publisher, but it now joins a family whose combined traffic is eight times larger than what AnandTech was on its own. Our goal is to continue to invest in what we feel is the right approach to building high quality content; now we have an even greater ability to do just that.
345 Comments
View All Comments
Dribble - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
So where is the nexus 9 review then? New hardware (first ever nvidia cpu, first highish end nexus device), new os (first 64 bit android device). It came out over a month ago, and nothing but a short preview when it was released.JarredWalton - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
It's in progress... Josh or Andrei is working on it, Ryan is helping, but with school, flu, other stuff it has been delayed. Just like the Omega drivers article, which I spent probably 40 hours or so running benchmarks on. Hopefully that goes up this week, as my part was pretty much done the day they launched. :)OldFred - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Get some reading glasses!FunBunny2 - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
What's not understood, apparently, is that the leading/cutting edge of mobile is battery tech, not node shrinks. Unless/until some Einstein figures out a completely new chemistry (I know....), the envelope remains the same. Mo power to duh peoples.FlyTexas - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Jarred,Put down the Nexus and pickup an iPhone 6 Plus. Yea, yea, you like Android, I know... you want web pages to load as fast as your laptop? You can have that today, and with only TWO CORES! :)
In my work, we've used Motorola, Samsung, etc.. Android phones... the iPhone screens were too small... with the 6 Plus, we've replaced everything across the board with 6 Plus and what a nice change it has been. Expensive perhaps, but they "just work" and a number of headaches are gone.
For all the "tech specs" of the Galaxy S series, it never really felt that fast, I'm quite shocked actually at how well these work, given the 1GB of RAM and dual core CPU, but it is faster than our Galaxy S4s that they replaced when doing almost everything.
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Is the iPhone 6 Plus faster than a SHIELD Tablet? Because I have one of those as well, and while it's faster than my Nexus 5 isn't also still clearly slower than my laptop or desktop. Both can be "fast enough" depending on the task, but we're still at least a few more generations of hardware away from the performance I want in a tablet/smartphone. Greedy, I know.FlyTexas - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I don't know, I haven't used a SHIELD Tablet...What I do know is that my work laptop is a nice Haswell based Core i7 machine with a 256 GB SSD, and it doesn't pull up AnandTech.com any faster than my iPhone 6 Plus does.
It is twice as fast as my old Galaxy S4, and given the specs on that phone I'm shocked at the difference. Both phones are on Verizon, so no carrier change.
Note that this is not benchmarks, it is subjective feeling, but I did just try it today on both to see the difference.
Frankly I think you rely too much on performance benchmarks that often don't translate in the real world and less on professional experience and opinion. SSDs are a great example. Yes, the Samsung 850 Pro is faster than the 840 EVO, no doubt about it. Much, much faster than the older Intel 320 series, yes?
You know what? Running Windows doing average daily tasks, you can't really tell the difference between any of them. Yes, the benchmarks show a difference, but it doesn't translate. More or less, ANY SSD is a vast improvement over ANY HDD, it really doesn't matter which one.
For the record, I've used OCZ, Samsung, Intel, and Crucial SSDs, we now only deploy Crucial MX100 SSDs due to the price and dependability. I have a 840 EVO in my personal desktop and it is fine, as it the Intel 320 in my laptop. It doesn't really matter. :)
DarkStryke - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Non-Anand content has been seriously lacking and quite frankly shallow in many areas, especially mobile.Saw this coming.
Takamata - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I would say it hasn't been bad since Anand left, but I do feel like the exemplary quality of pieces is down a bit. And occasionally something surprisingly blah.FlyTexas - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Go back and read some stuff from 10 years ago, then tell me it isn't bad. It has been going down for some time now. :)