Topix Creators Brag about Creating a Large, Useless News Site

Topix is a news aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography. Topix LLC is a privately held company. Gannett, The McClatchy Company and Tribune Company own a 75% stake in the company.

Today Topix announced that Topix becomes #1 news site of Gannett, Tribune & McClatchy Internet Portfolio -from Topix blog. I have a few problems with this:

1. This sounds like a made up category, ie. Metaprinter is the #1 news site of the Metaprinter Inc. portfolio!
2. Topix is ranked #32 in the news category on Alexa.
3. Compete doesn’t show Topix beating USAToday as stated in the above article.

4. I don’t know anyone who uses or likes Topix. In fact, reading through the comments at the above post, it seems most people suspect the site is full of flame wars, trolls and hate speak.
5. For their size, Topix does not have a vibrant hyperlocal online community.
6. Where are the local advertisers?

I’ve contacted them for an interview. We’ll see if they can clear some things up.

UPDATE:

An anonymous tipster has revealed to me that some news sites use Topix for their article comments section. See for example this Gannett owned news site: citizen-times.com

Note the ‘comment on Topix forums’ option directly below the social bookmarking tools in addition to the Pluck Sitelife comments option at the end of the article.
“If you choose the Topix comment option, and enough discussion is generated on topix, it presumably bubbles up the story on Topix and the inbound links to the news site generate page views and more discussion”.

A little more digging on my part revealed that Tribune is using Topix.net to link to “Related News From the Web” as here below the Google Ads box in the body on their Baltimore Sun site. The purpose here again is to increase pageviews and links. It seems that Topix is nothing more than a solution for member newspapers to game the system and/or get more Google Juice.

5 thoughts on “Topix Creators Brag about Creating a Large, Useless News Site”

Robert:

- The numbers we reported are from comScore, as is the category that they have us in (newspaper web site).
- We do indeed provide commentary for both the tribune and media news group publications. That accounts for about 20% of our inbound traffic. Our view is that the commentary, especially around local, is in fact the news.
- Compete, Alexa, quantcast, hitwise, etc all vary quite a bit. We’ve been pretty consistent about using comScore, since we pay through the nose for the service, and it seems that advertisers use this as their primary stat.
- We get over 16M unique visitors a month according to Google Analytics and with over 140,000 comments a day, and a 50% return rate I suppose it doesn’t matter that much whether you know anyone who uses or likes our site
- I never heard from you about a request for a comment — found this from the link off of the WEF.

Happy to chat further.

Chris Tolles
CEO Topix
twitter:@tolles

Here it is again Chris…

from Robert Ivan
to media@topix.com
date Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:51 PM
subject request for interview
mailed-by gmail.com

hide details Apr 22

Follow up message
I’m interested in interviewing someone at Topix for metaprinter.com This can be done via skype, phone, email Q&A, live chat, etc… I’ve been critical of your site in the past, maybe you can clear things up?

Metaprinter seek to interview any person or company doing innovative things in new media or traditional media. We prize innovation here at metaprinter and encourage media organizations to come on here and trumpet their achievements. The goal of the interview is to find out a little bit more information than what can be found already online or in print

http://www.metaprinter.com/interviews/

best,
Robert

Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

I find it to be a vibrant, open-ended repository of commentary that reflects a myriad of users. These users may be there for the news (and a chance to comment) on a vast variety of subjects and locales, for the social interaction, to promote their own views, to troll or flame, to find a common ground in which to discuss a subject which interests them or for any number of other reasons.

It is a microcosm of the (mostly) literate world-at-large. It seems to me you’d fit right in there somewhere…

Regards,

Trilby

I’ve posted comments to various subjects on Topix the last month or so often on sensitive issues such as police brutality, the Exxon Valdez settlement, and violence over driver cellphone use/ misuse. Several times the icons that other users can place in my comment box to express approval or disapproval to my comments have been edited, always toward the negative. In one instance, my entire comment disappeared. I have been concerned this is nothing more than a propaganda site or a Fox-like editorial based news reporting farce.. Thank you for posting the owners here, I have been looking to see what could be gained from the activities Topix has engaged in. Basicly, it appears they are in the slant-to-suit news business.

Topix is quite useless if one intends to have an intelligent conversation. The threads are filled with people insulting each other and you can be sure that if you comment on something then someone will insult you before long. Of course there may be a place for this kind of thing but I prefer moderated sites that prevent blowhards from dominating the conversation. That’s just my opinion though. For the people that prefer the anarchy of topix, well more power to them. It’s just not for me.

Chris Tolles on May 12, 2009 at 4:55 pm said:

Robert:

- The numbers we reported are from comScore, as is the category that they have us in (newspaper web site).
- We do indeed provide commentary for both the tribune and media news group publications. That accounts for about 20% of our inbound traffic. Our view is that the commentary, especially around local, is in fact the news.
- Compete, Alexa, quantcast, hitwise, etc all vary quite a bit. We’ve been pretty consistent about using comScore, since we pay through the nose for the service, and it seems that advertisers use this as their primary stat.
- We get over 16M unique visitors a month according to Google Analytics and with over 140,000 comments a day, and a 50% return rate I suppose it doesn’t matter that much whether you know anyone who uses or likes our site
- I never heard from you about a request for a comment — found this from the link off of the WEF.

Happy to chat further.

Chris Tolles
CEO Topix
twitter:@tolles
robert ivan on May 12, 2009 at 11:24 pm said:

Here it is again Chris…

from Robert Ivan
to media@topix.com
date Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:51 PM
subject request for interview
mailed-by gmail.com

hide details Apr 22


Follow up message
I’m interested in interviewing someone at Topix for metaprinter.com This can be done via skype, phone, email Q&A, live chat, etc… I’ve been critical of your site in the past, maybe you can clear things up?

Metaprinter seek to interview any person or company doing innovative things in new media or traditional media. We prize innovation here at metaprinter and encourage media organizations to come on here and trumpet their achievements. The goal of the interview is to find out a little bit more information than what can be found already online or in print

http://www.metaprinter.com/interviews/

best,
Robert
TrilbyKat on June 20, 2009 at 1:58 pm said:

Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

I find it to be a vibrant, open-ended repository of commentary that reflects a myriad of users. These users may be there for the news (and a chance to comment) on a vast variety of subjects and locales, for the social interaction, to promote their own views, to troll or flame, to find a common ground in which to discuss a subject which interests them or for any number of other reasons.

It is a microcosm of the (mostly) literate world-at-large. It seems to me you’d fit right in there somewhere…

Regards,

Trilby
Newday on July 6, 2009 at 4:43 pm said:

I’ve posted comments to various subjects on Topix the last month or so often on sensitive issues such as police brutality, the Exxon Valdez settlement, and violence over driver cellphone use/ misuse. Several times the icons that other users can place in my comment box to express approval or disapproval to my comments have been edited, always toward the negative. In one instance, my entire comment disappeared. I have been concerned this is nothing more than a propaganda site or a Fox-like editorial based news reporting farce.. Thank you for posting the owners here, I have been looking to see what could be gained from the activities Topix has engaged in. Basicly, it appears they are in the slant-to-suit news business.
Frank on July 13, 2009 at 3:25 pm said:

Topix is quite useless if one intends to have an intelligent conversation. The threads are filled with people insulting each other and you can be sure that if you comment on something then someone will insult you before long. Of course there may be a place for this kind of thing but I prefer moderated sites that prevent blowhards from dominating the conversation. That’s just my opinion though. For the people that prefer the anarchy of topix, well more power to them. It’s just not for me.