Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency

Please clap for Techmeme

Techmeme turns 20 freaking years old today. This is our self-congratulatory post marking the occasion. Please share, retweet, and offer your sincerest congratulations. And thanks to so many of you for reading us all these years.

Now if Techmeme is new to you, here's a short definition: Techmeme is a news aggregator highlighting the latest news reports that tech industry leaders need to be aware of, placed alongside contrasting perspectives from social media and other outlets.

Now that's a little boring, so here's a more grandiose description: Techmeme is the one essential news site for tech founders, execs, investors, innovators, writers, and assorted thought leaders. It achieves this the only way possible: by being an aggregator that links out to the best reports on the latest key events in tech, ranks them, and commingles them with the most notable posts from social media and beyond. It's made possible through a unique approach to curation combining algorithms with a team of human editors. The result is a site industry leaders visit daily to update their priors (so to speak) before diving deeper at more specialized journalistic outlets, newsletters, forums like HN or Reddit, and networks like X/LinkedIn/Threads/Bluesky. Unlike an RSS reader, Techmeme is not something you customize. Rather, everyone sees the same Techmeme, so it is the industry's shared context.

Techmeme has remained absurdly consistent

A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major and uncontested takeaway is that Techmeme has remained paradoxically incredibly consistent, even as technology, the web, and news have changed so profoundly. In 2005 Techmeme was a free, single-page website, continuously ranking and organizing links from news outlets, personal sites, and corporate sites, and it remains so in 2025. Of course this point has been made before, and came up again this past week.

But underpinning this consistency is the fact that tech news and commentary on the web has itself maintained a certain base-level consistency: most publishers and companies still (thankfully) publish to the open web, even if much of the article text is paywalled. Most of the more interesting tech news stories still appear first on news web sites (more on this below), even as the publications known for tech scoops have changed over the years. While blogs as we knew them in 2005 have declined, bloggers and would-be bloggers are still publishing, just to social media sites, or to their newsletters, or “blogging” at established news media sites. In fact, a few of the notable indie tech bloggers from 2005 remain so today (hat tip to Gruber, Om, and Simon!)

Consistency has not come easy

Unfortunately for us, an array of trends has made this consistency quite challenging to maintain. Foremost among these is that crawling news sites has become much more difficult in recent years. Scanning the full text of news articles is important for us because the algorithms that alert our editors to news and organize our home page rely on analyzing that text. While it's challenging enough that a great deal of news is now paywalled, a more serious challenge is that with the rise of LLMs, many websites now simply block all bots except for a small number of search engines.

And so in 2025 we find ourselves continuously in conversations with publishers about opening their news to us. Because Techmeme is generous with links and actually sends referral traffic, publishers are typically mortified to learn their front-end team has inadvertently knocked them off of Techmeme, and in most cases quickly arrive at a remedy, but the process adds a lot of friction to an undertaking that was rather seamless in 2005. (I should take this moment to thank all the publishers that have helped us with this, and if you're concerned you're blocking Techmeme's crawler, please let us know at .)

Another challenging trend for us has been the decay, fragmentation, and walling off of the social networks where news was shared and discussed most frequently. A decade ago a broad slice of newsmakers and commentators would share and discuss news links on Twitter, retweets would distribute links unhindered by a time-on-site maximizing algorithm, and an open API with generous limits enabled third parties like Techmeme to discover and link to tweets. Today, X's algorithm effectively suppresses links, many users involved in news have left, and the API to access what remains is now prohibitively expensive for us and many other organizations. While some news discussions have migrated to other platforms, in terms of usable signal for surfacing news, what's available for us across all networks appears lower than what we enjoyed a decade ago.

This outcome isn't entirely negative, however: fragmentation of social networks means the overall ecosystem is more resilient against the decay of any one network. Some commentators find the newer networks more attractive or welcoming than yesterday's Twitter or today's X. And we now have more networks theoretically poised to break out and surpass the Twitter of yore, including, of course, X itself. (More on those in the next section.) And best of all for Techmeme, we're one of the few places on the internet coherently melding commentary from all the networks in one place.

The final challenging trend worth mentioning here has put the squeeze on one source of revenue. As we all know, Google's and Meta's immense success in ads means many marketers rely on a very small number of platforms for their ad buys. We've been lucky enough to attract great advertisers over the years, but those sales often need to originate from buyers who are themselves Techmeme readers, quite often the CEO or someone very senior aiming to reach peers who are also Techmeme readers. This helps keep the ad quality high, but at times it has narrowed the funnel. (Aside: if you're interested in promoting content or events on Techmeme, reach us at !)

A surviving and thriving tech press makes our consistency possible

One reason our consistency surprises people is because so much has changed in media the past two decades.Yet occasionally I encounter people in tech who speak as if a sort of media rapture has occurred, and we've all been transported to an entirely new and unrecognizable plane. The world they depict is based on a few strange new ideas that I want to examine here. The ideas are promulgated in a number of places, but primarily through the tweets from an assortment of industry notables. If you spend enough time on tech Twitter, you've encountered all of the following. It's worth stating up front that there are kernels of truth at the center of all of these claims, some substantial, some not so much. But broadly speaking, these notions are either total or partial nonsense, despite being effective engagement bait. Let us now dive in!

• “Tech journalism today is just resentment-fueled score-settling against the wealthier tech class”: The motivation for this is the fact that some reporters and editors really are ideologically hostile to corporations, and their tendency is to focus on the negative. This focus of course comes much easier in recent years given the many aggressive moves by tech companies which have now amassed unprecedented power. But the output from these reporters are narratives still based on facts. And then at the same time, many more reporters occupy different positions on the ideological spectrum. Fundamentally, reporters are careerists whose craft is building narratives based on facts, and the companies paying for the most consequential journalism are profit-seeking outlets often supported by subscribers who work primarily in business. Bloomberg and The Information are not here to destroy Silicon Valley, obviously. They exist to make money through fact-based storytelling.
• “Tech journalism is dying”: This idea is an extrapolation from the very real decline of the traffic-chasing ad-supported publications that were more prominent in the 2010s, or from imagining tech news outlets have a lot in common with local newspapers. In reality, outlets like Bloomberg, WSJ, The Information, FT, and NYT, and newsletters like Newcomer, Platformer, and Stratechery are doing rather fine financially. You might even say they've found product-market fit. They're also doing well by any reasonable measure of impact, so much so that even strident tech media critics keep sharing screenshots of news articles from tech reporters.
• “Citizen journalism is the future of media”: The main problem with this claim is “citizen journalism” is ill-defined. While people don't agree on what it means, let's just agree it's great when nonjournalists contribute accurate information to the information space. And let's agree it's great that many barriers to producing journalism have fallen away. But it's doubtful people just posting observations to social media without doing reporting will displace journalism, and if you don't believe me, well, this is something the marketplace will decide in time.
• “The best media strategy for a founder is to 'go direct'”: The people repeating this mantra are right about two key things: first, to the extent that you can, it's good to translate your vision into a voice that resonates online, because you can then channel that voice into your marketing. And second, it's usually not worth the effort of trying to get announcements for your nascent startup written up on news sites. But missing in a lot of the “go direct” sermonizing is that the latter point has always been the case! There have long been way too many companies for the media to report on in a way that would move the needle, either for you, or for them. An even stranger idea sometimes bundled with “go direct” is that you should never even communicate with journalists. Of course once you operate at a large enough scale, inbound media requests will turn up, and ignoring these is a lost opportunity at best, and reckless at worst, so this kind of advice is, without exaggeration, malpractice.
• “YouTube and TikTok are making text-based news media irrelevant”: It's true people spend enormous amounts of time today learning about everything on these networks, and that includes technology, and even tech news. Moreover, podcasts (which are usually also hosted on YouTube), have probably even reduced the pressure to blog for some. But an industry rife with purpose-driven news consumers will continue to demand the speed, informational density, and scanability of text-based media. And so a steady supply of text-based news will continue to meet that demand.
• “X is all you need to stay on top of tech news”: It can certainly feel that way when you dip into high-engagement subcommunities or witness riveting interactions between newsmakers. In particular, subcommunities like “AI Twitter”, which include many industry notables, are so rife with chatter and gossip that news will often break there, or at least surface there very quickly after breaking elsewhere. But these communities are in fact the exception to the rule. There are big and important sectors of the broader tech industry almost completely absent from X day to day. And there are tech stories attracting considerable chatter on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads that are DOA on X. In reality, the news you see on X is a small slice of the short viral head of a long tail of news and news chatter. And this really shouldn't come as a surprise: most people aren't active X users, even in tech, and very few people actually post with any frequency.
• “Ignore what's on Bluesky or Threads”: If you've heard this, it's probably from someone popular on X who's gotten dogpiled by the fringe left on Bluesky. And to be clear, these dynamics are real, unpleasant, and something I would imagine Bluesky management considers a problem, since repelling notable posters can crimp overall growth. But the typical experience for a typical Bluesky user is not unlike classic Twitter: people follow people they're interested in and interactions are generally positive. Moreover, in part by not imposing the “link penalty”, enough journalists who joined Bluesky in prior years have stuck around that it often feels like the current home of “tech journalism Twitter”, along with the sort of conversations that extend from that. Threads has gotten a bad rap for similar reasons, though with Meta shepherding millions of users each week to the app, the userbase now feels very normie. A lot of journalists and other news pundits in tech consider this an audience they can't ignore, so you'll find tech news-relevant conversations there as well. So while neither network has surpassed X in terms of tech industry news commentary (and both have a long way to go on AI, VC, and crypto chatter), if you care what people say on X, you should keep an eye on the other networks too.

To summarize, a bunch of people in tech with a vested interest in essentially becoming the media are hoping you'll believe the world of news dissemination has turned completely upside down. And then conveniently the corners of the internet where they have a foothold just so happen to be the future! But you should in fact believe your own eyes: yes, news has evolved considerably with the internet, but journalists are still very often the earliest to chronicle a lot of what we need to know about how the industry is changing. Not so shockingly, news professionals drive news. And there are networks playing a role in news other than just the one owned by the world's richest guy.

So in short, as a lot in media changes, a lot stays the same. And Techmeme's consistency is a product of what's constant in online media.

Will Techmeme remain consistent for another 20 years?

Honestly, we don't know. Even though we have 20 years behind us, projecting 20 years in the future feels foolhardy. And this has been a tough week to even imagine where our country will be in 20 years. But I can list few general directions we're considering for our continued work over the next few years, and they all build on, and not upend, what we've accomplished:

• Participation: Recently we've introduced new ways for newsmakers and comms professionals to explicitly tip links. Under every headline on our desktop page an “Add Link Here” button appears when you hover over the news, and we're happy to add any secondary link (LinkedIn posts, tweets, blog posts, etc.) rounding out our aggregation for that story. And while we're fussier about featuring new top-level headlines, we now have a form for tipping those as well. I believe there are many other ways input from users could improve the site and look forward to introducing features to solicit this input.
• Customization: While every reader of our homepage sees the same Techmeme, for over five years we've offered aggregation services that let companies discover trending or carefully-filtered news in real time. Customers include tech companies of all sizes, including tech giants, as well as VC firms, who are especially thrilled with our portfolio news tracking. If you'd like to find out what we can do for you, email .
• Expansion: What I haven't yet mentioned here is that alongside Techmeme we operate aggregation sites tracking other news verticals, like Mediagazer for media, and even sites running with no human editors, like memeorandum for US politics. I believe by adding more smarts (particularly LLM-enabled intelligence) across our software platform, adding more quality news verticals over time becomes attainable.

It's a tech industry cliche, but I really feel we're at the start of our mission here. So thanks for joining us during our first 20 years, and I hope you'll enjoy what lies ahead. And this concludes our self-absorption — now back to news about other companies!

Techmeme now publishing paid and free "Leaderboards" showing the most influential reporters around a specific news topic

Today Techmeme has begun publishing Topic Leaderboards, which list the top authors and publications covering topic areas such as cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, and cryptocurrency, with additional topics to come. While this information will interest reporters and editors, it will be especially useful to communications professionals who need a way to identify the reporters covering a particular technology news category, or founders and other startup employees who have the same need.

How Topic Leaderboards are ranked

These new leaderboards are ordered to highlight the most influential and prolific authors covering a specific topic area. In this way, they're similar in format to the leaderboards we've offered for years, which ranked authors and publications for all Techmeme news rather than individual topics. We're therefore calling these new lists leaderboards as well, and they now reside at the same URL.

However, there's a key difference in how these new leaderboards are ordered versus our general leaderboards: Topic Leaderboard ranking is not based on the frequency of Techmeme front page placement. Instead, taking advantage of Techmeme's rich crawl data and sophisticated topic-tagger, Topic Leaderboards are based on, first, the quantity of links to articles on that topic from peers and influential industry people in social media, and second, the total number of articles on the topic that an author or publication posts. In short: being well-cited and prolific on the topic leads to a higher ranking.

Introducing Topic Leaderboard reports

How are Topic Leaderboards presented? Each topic gets a report, which is essentially the pairing of an author leaderboard and a publication leaderboard for that topic. The author leaderboard will typically include 100 or more ranked authors, and each author entry will consist of a name, a Twitter profile link if available (useful for obtaining contact details), associated publication(s), an influence score based on inbound link volume, and a short list of headlines showing some of the best recent contributions on that topic from the writer. The publication leaderboard comes next in the report, offering similar ranking details. Reports draw on the past four months of crawl data and are updated weekly, ensuring the data we provide stays timely even as authors develop or switch their beats, get hired, and change jobs.

Paid reports: Obtaining an extensive list of the best reporters for discussing launches or general relationship-building based on meaningful signals and data can be an enormous time-saver. In fact, many PR agencies and companies already devote considerable resources to the not-so-fun task of compiling information for this purpose, a process that's often more manual and qualitative than data-driven. Meanwhile, subscription PR tools that purport to organize reporters by topic are often woefully inadequate and even inaccurate, sending PR pros to the wrong reporters with frustration ensuing on both sides. To account for the value provided by these leaderboards, and to give Techmeme its first paid content offering, most Topic Leaderboards are available as paid downloads. They'll be sold individually for an introductory price of $100 each, though this price may increase as we introduce even more useful data into these reports. A purchase will give the buyer the opportunity to download in both html and pdf formats up to five times (to permit access on multiple devices).

Free reports: We also offer several free reports, covering some of the more buzzy tech news topics (for instance: Facebook and iPhones), and plan to continue doing so indefinitely. If you're wondering what our paid reports look like, just look through the free options and assess how much value you see in this format.

We want feedback!

Today, we're launching with just 20 paid and 4 free reports, but plan to grow the number of topics in the months ahead. Be sure to check back periodically to see what we've added. And if you don't see the topics you're most interested in, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a suggestion here (there are no bad suggestions!). Second, do you have other informational needs that you believe Techmeme's crawl data may be uniquely suited to addressing? Please let us know your thoughts by emailing us .

Thank you, and now a Q&A

At Techmeme, we're thrilled to find new ways to analyze and summarize information to empower people in the industry, just as we've done all along with our news aggregation. As always, thanks for reading, and we hope you find our new offerings valuable. To conclude, here are some answers to questions some of you will have:

Automatically respond to news topics on Techmeme with our new contextual ads

Today, Techmeme is introducing ads that are automatically placed under stories matching news topics that an advertiser wants to target. They're a great way to associate your brand with a specific category of technology products, or even to challenge individual companies.

For instance, Yelp is now advertising against news about Google, to urge the search giant to “Focus on the User”. Crypto wallet maker BRD is targeting news about cryptocurrency to tell Techmeme readers about its free, open-source app. And cloud enterprise software maker Freshworks will target CRM news to highlight Freshsales.

Why is Techmeme the right venue for ads that react to news in this way? Because it's where readers go to see ideas in conflict. Techmeme is, after all, the arena where industry-driven news meets critical reaction and analysis. So by letting companies speak out and confront issues in this manner, we provide an additive, even entertaining experience for readers.

The benefit for advertisers from these ads should be clear enough. First, the “direct response” aspect can help companies meet immediate signup goals. But the brand associations that arise from such assertive messaging can be vivid and lasting. After all, if you can position yourself as the antidote to a well-known problem, why not take that opportunity? And the quality of Techmeme's decision-maker and “influencer”-heavy audience can help ensure that effort is worthwhile.

How do these ads work? An advertiser supplies a message, an ad budget, and matching criteria. The matching criteria can be as simple as the mention of a company in a headline, or a broader news category such as cloud computing, cryptocurrency, security software, e-commerce, machine learning, or enterprise chat. Techmeme then matches against its posted stories, placing the advertiser's message until the total placement hours determined by the ad budget are fully delivered. To support this matching, we've built out a proficient topic-tagger backed by an extensive and expanding ontology (and we'll have more to say about that in a later post). I should note the possibilities for matches go even further than what's stated above. For instance, matching against arbitrary groups of companies or individuals, against geographic areas, or even against the news outlet that Techmeme features for a given story are easily doable.

Of course, there are limits to the sorts of messages we'll place. We'll decline to feature offensive or overly gimmicky ad copy. And we won't include negative ad messages aimed at current advertisers, in effect, guaranteeing a form of competitive separation.

If you're interested in contextual ads on Techmeme, don't hesitate to reach out at .

As the tech industry expands in reach and power, the value of contesting the dominant themes and challenging established players has grown proportionately. We're hoping these new ads can play a part, while also making Techmeme a more fun and intriguing read.

Sign up now for Techmeme's new daily newsletter

Today we're launching Techmeme's first newsletter. Sign up here! It goes out Sunday through Friday around 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern and, like Techmeme.com, summarizes the day's top tech news and commentary with an assortment of detailed headlines and links. But unlike Techmeme's website, it presents a simplified interface, offers an even more refined selection of tweets and Facebook posts, and organizes news by topic categories.

What does Techmeme's daily newsletter include?

- It begins with a rundown of tomorrow's events, including conferences and corporate earnings reports, pulled from the top of Techmeme's extremely useful event calendar.

- A "Top News" section then highlights the very biggest stories of the day, along with a short selection of commentary from Twitter and/or Facebook.

- News stories grouped by topic categories follow, like Funding Deals, Blockchain, or Infosec.

- A "More News" section then lists the rest of the day's stories of note.

Why does the universe need another tech newsletter?

While Techmeme's balance of breadth and brevity offers a unique lens on the news that tech industry readers have long found valuable, Techmeme's website hasn't served readers who live in their inbox. Obviously Techmeme's new newsletter can now serve these readers, but what isn't as clear is that it can even serve daily readers of the site in a key way. Why? Because visitors to Techmeme's website will miss out on news if they visit only once daily, given that news can fall off the page in fewer than 20 hours. Subscribing to Techmeme's newsletter will give these readers a convenient format for not missing a big story.

Another reason: as more specialized industry-oriented newsletters have grown in importance, the bigger-picture context that a Techmeme newsletter can provide is now vital. For instance, if you work in VC and find Dan Primack's newsletter essential for tracking which companies have raised capital, Techmeme's newsletter helps to flesh out the world in which those ventures need to compete. Or if you value the strategic insights Ben Thompson's newsletter offers, Techmeme's headlines provide the tick-tock account of the industry changes underpinning those insights. And if you read Casey Newton's newsletter for updates on how social networks are colliding with culture and governments, Techmeme's newsletter will help you see the ways social networks relate to rest of the industry.

More ways to get Techmeme

With this newsletter (sign up here!), Techmeme is now available on an ever broader variety of platforms. Most recently, we introduced The Techmeme Ride Home podcast. You can get every Techmeme headline in full in real time via our main Twitter account and every commentary tweet we include via our @TechmemeChatter account. Techmeme is also available on Facebook, and you can even get Alexa to read you Techmeme's top seven headlines.

Questions? Comments? Want to sponsor?

If you're interested in sponsoring, reach out at . Meanwhile, for general newsletter questions or comments, email .

And if you've waited until the end of this post to subscribe, that's fine, but it's now time to do the right thing and sign up here! Thank you!