Why VC investment doesn’t mean success for tech news sites

Danny Sullivan writes on Medium.com about the tech news sites that don’t draw attention from venture capital investors, unlike GigaOm, which closed Tuesday after getting $8 million in VC money a year ago.

Sullivan writes, “Over at The Information, Jessica Lessin’s kick-ass crew has been producing some of the most outstanding tech coverage you’ve ever seen. That’s not for a mass audience, since most of the masses aren’t going to shell-out $400 per year for it. But it doesn’t matter to Jessica, because as long as she’s got the audience she needs paying the bills and producing profits for her company to do great journalism, she’s good.

“That leads to me back to the big miss that I suspect is going on when it comes to publishers like Third Door Media, The Information, Skift and others. If your company is working fine internally to generate the revenues you’re after, no one notices. Instead, all the attention (and thus role-models, good or bad) goes to the VC-funded.

“Folks, someone getting a lot of VC investment isn’t a sign they’re successful at anything other than getting VC funding. I’ve been covering the search and tech space for nearly 20 years now. VCs make bad investments. An investment in a company could be a vote a confidence in it, that a VC has made a careful analysis that success is likely. Or, it could be a crapshoot.”

Read more here.