Today, the business is known as Geeknet. Much of the old OSDN has gone, yet a few of the key assets remain. Animation Factory was sold several years ago to Mecklermedia. What remains today is the e-commerce business Thinkgeek and a scaled down media operation consisting of the sites: Slashdot, Sourceforge and freshmeat.

Geeknet made many major changes in 2010, including:

1. Thinkgeek revenues grew 55% to $76M
2. Media revenues grew 11% to $18M
3. Kenneth Langone and the Geeknet board eliminated the entire media management team
4. Sold media sites: Ohloh and Geek.com
5. Moved it’s headquarters from California to Fairfax, VA, home of Thinkgeek

The growth of Thinkgeek is amazing and the team should be congratulated. The e-commerce business and the media business are two different businesses with widely different business models. With a 55% annual growth perhaps Geeknet should concentrate on this business and phase out and sell off the media business. I don’t know if this is Geeknet’s current strategy – if it is then keep an eye out for sales of Slashdot, freshmeat and Sourceforge. If it’s not, then perhaps it should be. AOL, Google, IDG and Ziff Davis would be a good fit for Geeknet’s media sites.

But it seems to me that any media company aiming to go deep into the modern world of user-generated media might want to think about buying this gem. Investment bankers, take heed.

Not only that, but whomever bought VA Software would be buying critical DNA — knowledge about what software the world is using. Sourceforge.net has essentially no competition, so effectively it has created a marketplace of producers and consumers.

Perhaps, my suggestion on January 3, 2006 in VA Software sells Animation Factory. Is there more to come? that VA Software divest of its media assets has been taken to heart and articles such as this are great ways to drum up interest. Or maybe VA Software itself is for sale and pushing its hottest media properties Slashdot and Sourceforge along with its affinity with Open Source, as the reason to buy the entire package.

The article asserts that the number of news sites Slashdot is linking to has skyrocketed. And that has reduced the impact Slashdot can make on each individual site’s traffic. I decided to do a little investigating.

For example, compare the number of original stories and links embedded in them on a random day over the last three years. I picked the last Tuesday of February — February 22 2005, February 24 2004 and February 25 2003. BTW: On Slashdot it’s really easy to look at any day in history by using the ?issue=yyyymmdd url parameter. For example, February 22 2005 is http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050222.

2003: 17 stories on the index page with 38 links
2004: 22 stories on the index page with 48 links
2005: 22 stories on the index page with 51 links

The difference between 2004 and 2005 is nominal where is the “skyrocket”? Three additional links on a given day cannot cause a radical decline in The Slashdot Effect.

The article also suggests that look alike sites are lessening the Slashdot Effect. This means that sites such as geek.com and gizmodo.com are diluting the Slashdot Effect. This is ridiculous. The average number of comments per story on geek.com is less than 25. Compare that to 450 comments per article on Slashdot. The lack of community focus on these competing sites means they are too weak to either generate their own Slashdot Effect or too insignificant to dilute Slashdot’s.

Finally, the article also suggests that the growing number of tech news sites is another reason that the Slashdot Effect is diminishing. I fail to see the logic here. The sheer growth of Slashdot unique visitors and page views negates this theory.

If there is, in fact, a decline in the Slashdot Effect aside from anecdotal evidence, there were no plausible reasons explored in the article. Perhaps, Slashdot has grown beyond its original tech editorial focus and is linking more frequently to sites beyond the conventional high tech list. Perhaps, the proliferation of links to CNET and other tech sites have, over time, caused readers to visit those sites as part of their normal daily reading habits. Perhaps, the visitors to Slashdot are becoming increasingly focused on the community comments themselves rather than the news links. Or perhaps, more and more visitors to Slashdot have already linked to the source from their RSS news and blogs reader.

At a minimum, I would hope that an interested journalist or anthropologist will take a closer look at Slashdot to find out if there is a correlation between its increasing page views and visitors and declining traffic referrals. My sense is that we may be seeing the evolution of this worldwide community and its dynamics, rather than simple advertising-mentality trend lines.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this Weblog post are my own. I am no longer associated with Slashdot, OSTG or VA Software.

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