Anandtech.com acquired by Tom's Hardware owner Purch Media

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Anandtech.com acquired by Tom's Hardware owner Purch Media

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Following the departure of founder and chief editor Anand Lal Shimpi in August, Anandtech.com is being acquired by Purch Media, the owners of Tom's Hardware Guide.

Anandtech's announcement posted:

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.

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 understated.

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.

While the announcement tries to be upbeat, it's hard to read this as anything other than the death of one of the last sources of editorially independent, in-depth content. Look forward to Top 10 lists and "reviews" of registry optimizers!

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 22:32

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# ¿ Sep 13, 2024 12:04

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

You Am I posted:

Yeah, Toms used to be good in the late 90s/early 2000s, but it is a shadow of its former self these days. Anandtech is still going on nicely after Anand's departure, but I can't see anything good coming out of this

I will say that they seem to have toned down the most grossly unethical fake reviews since the Purch acquisition, but yeah they sure as hell aren't publishing content that has value for anyone.

I still can't believe the two smartest people at Anandtech went to work for Apple of all companies.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 00:54

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Palladium posted:

Not only that with the general stagnation of PC industry as a whole, the other thing if you want useful information to decide hardware purchases on, Techreport reviews provides it so much better than Anandtech. For example, when TR has been doing SSD real-world load times and GPU frame time analysis for years while AT does neither it makes them look frankly amateurish in comparison.

I'll definitely give props to TechReport for their GPU frame time analysis, but Anandtech's SSD reporting has always been far better. Time measurements taken by hand aren't useful because the difference between drives is smaller than the margin of error. I mean look at this graph, it's the tested drivers in random order, without any pattern or logic. TR is doing good performance consistency testing now in their disk-intensive multi-tasking test, but that was pioneered by Anandtech and the way they present their data is very useful for exploring the behavior of drive firmware. TechReport also gave up on testing in motherboard reviews recently, instead just doing a marketing overview, which is pretty lame.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 14:41

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Hey guys this isn't a thread about Apple vs Android or poo poo like that. The point of what I said was mostly that those guys seemed to be smart dudes who enjoyed sharing their smart ideas with other people, and Apple is a company that hates sharing knowledge and ideas with outsiders. Given their recent history running a tech site to produce information for wide audiences, it seemed like a weird choice compared to a company like Qualcomm that is always talking about the inner workings of their SoC and in-house CPU cores.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 02:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Anandtech.com acquired by Tom's Hardware owner Purch Media