Storage Newsletter is a great publication. I particularly liked the honesty they showed when shutting the print edition, saying:
Customers don’t want to pay for information they believe is free on the net. The IT press worldwide has suffered a particularly severe crisis, which hasn’t missed us. Paper news is disappearing, sheaf by sheaf. Almost all publications have responded by creating web editions, where virtually the same content is available free of charge. They are sinking themselves, and we’re no different.
However since gong through this difficult transition, the publication appears to have done pretty well, and it was great to see that traffic has grown 55% in the last year, and the 20,000th story was posted on the site, and fascinating to see the most popular stories over time.
Although the first post was in November 2007, the stories that have generated the most views are not those that have been on the site the longest. In fact of the top five stories, three were posted this year, one last year and one in 2009.
Interestingly the top two stories generated over twice the number of page views of the fairly dull sounding “Dell Positioned in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Midrange Disk Arrays” third-placed post. Number two was an Apple story about the storage that is now part of iCloud: “Apple Ordered 12PB (!) of Storage on Isilon’s Systems”.
The most read story was an April fools day hoax: “NetApp to Acquire EMC for $9.5 Billion” that was posted this year. Whether this is a reflect of the brilliant journalism that created the hoax, or the dull material that is pumped out by many storage marketing departments, I don’t know. However it does show that whatever the industry, fun and creativity always have their place in PR.
