Like, the fact that someone is making money off of MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn’t swing it makes zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing and were all out of ideas.
But that’s private equity for you.
Private equity firms - or, at least, the ones that people complain about - don't own their own capital. They have to rent it from somewhere else, and those people get paid first.
The PE firm only really gets paid for their expertise when they make their hurdle. Ergo, PE is incentivized to make terribly short-sighted business decisions, because those are the ones that will bring in the money to make their hurdle. They get caught in a loop of buying and gutting otherwise productive businesses.
This capital structure made sense back when PE was a tiny part of the economy that bought and modernized small businesses, but now PE is more akin to a failing empire; with an entitled aristocratic class that will shiv any leader that tries to change the structure to be more sustainable. They are spending $2000 on candles and the candles have knives.
The only thing needed is a staticization of their website, which any CMS they had could very easily be set up to do. Look at the archives of NYT, they're barebone pages that preserve the content without any dynamic areas.
Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for replication and latency issues, and you're still only talking $200/month.
As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.
Users coming direct from organic search to an article tends to have the best: they’re more likely to be buyers and/or find the ads interesting.
Main downside with ads on tech sites is their users block ads a lot.
Even if you have a server doing something 100k rpm isn't insane amount of traffic to handle. It requires a relatively modest server.
Of course, now there’s less and less of a way to see if it’s hallucinating.
Going through this with an old hardware project where ChatGPT says _____ vulnerability exists in their early units, but zeeero references, even on archive.org
This reads like some shit-for-brains VP at the acquirer couldn’t figure out how to make it work, so they’re putting it on ice.
The most destructive part of acquisitions seems to be the acquirer assigning a low-talent leader to the new acquisition, who then by virtue of no experience runs it into the ground, then blames its failure on the company itself.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-ann...
> I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long.
It’s sad because I miss printed content like tech magazines.
AnandTech Farewell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 - Aug 2024 (598 comments)
Alternatively you could use solrwayback[2] to index and browse the warc files.
1: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/202409012...
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DWDS (digital dictionary of the German language) app is actually Kiwix!
... I haven't heard this name in 15 years probably. Back then you could bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop, it was only around 20-25 GB.
If you live in a low, but not zero, bandwidth environment... since the rise of LLMs it's now cheaper to have the models do your dirty work. Before, you might have to search through pages of results, load MBs of data and still not find the answer. Offloading that to a data center and getting a few hundred kB back is convenient. Coupled with Kiwix and you can do quite a lot with a lousy internet connection.
I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?!
Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared to the revenue from the ads.
Or is there another reason?
Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue milking easily for at least like half a decade?
kmfrk•6mo ago
Originally heard this via https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254.
The latest indexed frontpage in the Internet Archive is from July 28: https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anand....
The original farewell article, which is now only readable through the IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anand.... One paragraph reads:
"And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the collection, I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long."
[1]: https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555
layer8•6mo ago
musicale•6mo ago
gblargg•6mo ago
musicale•6mo ago
It's a shame because many of them had been publishing for decades. Were they really completely unsustainable? The ads in magazines like Computer Music and Future Music were actually interesting and relevant, unlike typical garbage web ads.
fredoralive•6mo ago
I doubt if magazines (and websites etc.) in general are doing great, but for obvious reasons the more techy stuff is probably going to be a bit more vulnerable, particularly in print.
TheOtherHobbes•6mo ago
tiffanyh•6mo ago
Seems people focused too much on the phrase "I am happy to report".
When the actual key phrase people missed was "for a while".
In hindsight, that implies knowledge it would be shutdown at some future date.
And while many people understand "indefinitely" to mean "unlimited", it also has a secondary meaning of "unspecified period of time".