gdgt

» see gdgt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In July 2008 Ryan Block posted on Engadget that he was stepping down as editor-in-chief to start a company. The company turned out to be a reunion: his co-founder was Peter Rojas, who had built Gizmodo, then left to build Engadget, and who had already handed Engadget to Block once. gdgt opened to the public on 1 July 2009 with $550,000 of seed money from True Ventures and Betaworks.

What they built was not a blog, which is the interesting part given who built it. gdgt was a database. Every phone and laptop and camera got a page with real specification fields, and every page carried two buttons: one for I have this, one for I want this. Your profile was the list those buttons produced. Discussion threaded onto the product rather than onto a news post, so the conversation about a two-year-old camera stayed attached to the camera instead of scrolling off the front page in a day. A Series A of $3.165 million arrived in 2010, bringing the total to $3.7 million.

They also ran gdgt Live, a traveling consumer gadget expo where readers could actually hold the hardware, which funded the site in a way banner ads on a specifications table never would. Then in 2012 came the deal that decided everything: Engadget started embedding the gdgt databox, a block of structured product data served from gdgt into Engadget's own articles. AOL owned Engadget. AOL could see the traffic. On 13 February 2013 AOL bought gdgt outright for what reporting described as a high seven figure sum, and both founders came along with it.

Nine months later, on 18 November 2013, Engadget shipped a full redesign. The device database came out of gdgt, and so did the user profiles and the price comparison hanging off it. Block and Engadget executive editor Marc Perton both said the merge had not been the plan at acquisition time, it just became the obvious move. The last Wayback capture of gdgt.com serving its own pages is from early November 2013. By February 2014 the domain answered with a redirect.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the databox did ~

The databox is the reason this grave matters more than the traffic numbers suggest. In 2012 a gadget blog's product pages were usually an afterthought, a tag archive with a picture. gdgt's were a schema, and once Engadget was pulling that schema into its posts, Engadget's readers were using gdgt without knowing it. Every tech site now has the same furniture, a spec table with a price row full of retailer links underneath it. That shape was not invented at gdgt, but gdgt is where it got refined by people who had spent five years writing the posts it was meant to support.

~ what i actually read ~

By 2009 I had TTNet broadband and a habit left over from the forum years. If I wanted to know what was inside a phone, I went to a donanimhaber thread where somebody had already pasted the specifications and forty pages of people arguing about them. gdgt was trying to replace that argument with a table. The table is more useful and the thread was more fun, so I kept going to the thread.

~ where everyone went ~

Rojas stayed in the business sideways, moving to Betaworks, which had seeded gdgt in the first place, and into investing. Block spent a couple of years inside AOL and then left, and in July 2014 became briefly and accidentally famous for recording a Comcast retention agent who would not let him cancel his service. Engadget is still running. The database they built to compete with it is now a tab on it.

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