TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat: Who Publishes the Most about Twitter?

Rolling Stone recently published the Top 100 Albums of the Decade. To my surprise, not one but two Bruce Springsteen albums made the top 25 (The Rising at 15 and Magic at 24). Now, as blasphemous as this sounds coming from a Jersey man, there is no way that Magic belongs in top 100 of the decade or even the top 100 of 2007.

Why is Bruce so blatantly overrepresented in this countdown? The only answer is that Bruce Springsteen is important to the Rolling Stone business. When Bruce does well, Rolling Stone sells more magazines/ad space. This got me thinking about social media...

What about Twitter? Which of the four major tech blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat) publishes the most content about Twitter? For this, I took a quick look at our Pinyadda index from November and formulated the following chart (click image to enlarge):

Twitter-centric Posts as % of all Posts:
TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat

As you can see, TechCrunch is far and wide the most prolific of the publications, producing approximately 2 times the amount of content as Mashable, 4.5 times the amount as ReadWriteWeb and 3.3 times the amount as VentureBeat.

Scanning titles and various meta-data for 'twitter', it appears that only 7.8% of TechCrunch's articles are about Twitter. Compare that the the 8.6% for VentureBeat, 15.1% for ReadWriteWeb and a whopping 20.7% for Mashable.

Yes, one-fifth of Mashable's content for the month of November was Twitter-centric. Imagine, if you will, that Twitter's popularity wanes (gasp!). What is Mashable to do? Produce less content? Unlikely. Fill the gaping content hole with other content? Likely.