Originally posted by: Geekbabe
That upper middle class SUV driving mother in Wisconsin who wants
to surprise her husband with a new computer, that accountant
in North Carolina who wants to gift his elderly parents with a new
Home theater setup.. and countless other non-tech literate people
who need help,reviews in order to make informed purchasing choices.
This quote struck me as a little odd. Now, I haven't been a member of these forums for all that long but I've been reading Anantech for a good 10 years now. This is not cnet, it is never going to cater to the SUV driving mother you speak off. It isn't designed too. To flesh that out all you have to do is read one article on the front page.
They are incredibly detailed and delved deeply into the technical specifications that the housewife wouldn't care about. If a husband told his wife, "I want a new videocard for Christmas" and she goes to research on the internet, Anandtech will tell her "Card X has new pixel shader technology, uses twice as many stream processors, and here is a graph that compares it to 10 other cards while a site like CNET will tell her, "Card X is faster and quieter than Card Y. Here is a chart comparing Card X with two other cards. We give Card X a 8/10 and Card Y a 5/10."
Which do you think will be better for SUV mom? In the future, which site do you think she will return too. If Anandtech really wanted to target the non-PC literate mainstream as their bread and butter, the articles would be written more in line with something like a CNET. I would never blame Anand for expanding his audience, as I believe the real hardcore PC audience is dwindling (as the driving force behind most upgrades, PC gamers, are either going toward consoles or less demanding games such as WOW) and if he wants to do that, getting rid of the OT and Social forums (or worse, charging for them) would be a huge mistake.
How does that relate to OT? Well, there are two types of people that frequent forums. Using AVSForum as an example, the one question poster (Hey guys, I heard about this site from a friend, which Plasma should, I buy/why do i have black bars still/etc) and the hardcore enthusiast (the lifers on AVS who discuss bitrates on Blu Ray discs and the technical details of building a Home Theater). AVS does not have an off topic forum, so the community that has been built there is exclusively built from the hardcore crowd. The one and done crowd disappear until they have a new question to ask sometime in the future.
What the social forums do is build a community of a diverse group of people. Not everyone that posts on ATOT is a hardcore computer nerd (granted the percentage is very high) and many of the people who post in OT don't even venture into the tech forums on this site. This has two effects, first it keeps the more casual one and done user involved in the site (I know I visit a LOT more since I registered for the forums) and it helps ATOT branch out into areas where it would have a tough time competing.
Again, using AVS as an example. If someone wanted to know of a website to go for HDTV information, 99/100 people would say AVS before they said the HT forum on anandtech. Now take a guy like YoYo, resident HT expert on anandtech. When a member of ATOT wants to post a question about HT, he knows there's this Jello guy on the forums that knows his stuff and he doesn't bother to visit AVSforum. That's an extra page view for AT Forums, an extra eye on a banner, that wouldn't have existed if YoYo did not exist in AT land.
Maybe YoYo has run an ad blocker since day one, maybe he has never clicked a banner ad, but I think it would be FOOLISH to say that he has not put a couple of extra bills in Anand's pocket. I don't mean to single out YoYo, there are guys like him in EVERY subforum of the site (CPA during tax time is another example), and these guys retain users on the forums and the website and ultimately put more money in Anand's pocket.
If I'm not mistaken, that is the ultimate goal here, isn't it?
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