Engadget committed three crimes in my book:
- Ads in their feed. Feeds save money by reducing bandwidth requirements. There is no reason to plaster ads there as well.
- Ripping MoCoLoCo and Joystiq items. Clue for you: if it’s made of wood, it’s not a gadget. Also, I don’t like reading things twice. And the PSP price story posted today carries the same typos.
- Having the same content as Gizmodo, which gives me another choice in gagetry feeds.
Good-bye, Engadget. I’m dropping your RSS feed.
Comment (1)
1. I’m sorry you’re displeased, but running a site like Engadget costs money (we pay our writers, which is why you can expect about 25-35 posts every weekday). And using an RSS doesn’t actually save all that much bandwidth since we use a full feed that includes photos (which is what sucks up most of our bandwidth). Given the large percentage of our readers who use RSS and never actually visit the site, it makes sense to use the RSS feed as a source of ad revenue. It certainly makes more sense than charging people. People didn’t like it when banner ads starting showing up online, but we’ve learned to live with it. We’re just putting unobtrusive text ads in the feed, I don’t think that that’s so bad.
2. We OWN Joystiq, and we sometimes crosspost items to both sites. We’re not ripping them off. We’ve never swiped text from MoCoLoco (we do link to them frequently, and have been thanked by their editor for doing so), so I’m not sure what you’re referring to.
3. There is some overlap with Gizmodo, but we do roughly twice as many stories as they do every day. You’ll be missing out on 50% of the news if you only read one site, not to mention all of Engadget’s unique features like our columns, How-To’s, interviews, etc.
I hope we can convince you to keep reading!
Cheers,
Peter Rojas
Editor, Engadget