Examining the Engadget strategy

Lukas Alpert of The Wall Street Journal writes about tech news site Engadget, which is broadening its coverage.

Alpert writes, “As the site increasingly began to focus on broader tech issues earlier this year, traffic has begun to tick back up. Unique visitors to the site in October were up 25% compared with same month last year at 10.8 million, according to comScore Inc. By comparison, rival CNET was slightly down in October year-over-year at 32.2 million. Traffic to the Verge jumped 27% in the same period to 19.8 million.

“Overall, the tech media space has become very crowded in recent years, making it harder to stand out. Earlier this year, the nine-year-old site Gigaom ceased publishing after announcing it was unable to pay its creditors. Its assets were later purchased and the site was relaunched. In May, the technology-news website Re/code was acquired by Vox Media.

“‘We have a very engaged audience and that helps us stand out,’ said Mr. Desmond. ‘You can see it when we write reviews for really big products, on the site there are literally thousands of comments, and its very high quality commentary as people argue about the finer point of things.”

Read more here.