Examiner.com Closed July 10th

[Tay]

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The online content creators at Examiner.com will be shutting down.

The website will close down on or around July 10, according a message circulated on Tuesday.

“Media consumption has transformed dramatically over the years and our content initiatives have shifted with business priorities,” said the message.

The Denver-based news, entertainment and lifestyle network was launched in 2008 and acquired by AXS Digital Group in 2014. Articles were written and submitted by independent contributors. According to the website, it boasted more than 20 million readers every month.

“Effective immediately, Examiner.com will stop taking any new submissions,” said the message on Tuesday. Contributors were instructed to take steps to preserve their work and assured outstanding payments would be honored.

Source: Online Content Platform Examiner.com Shutting Down​

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Source: Examiner.com Closing Next Week, 2 iMediaEthics Investigations Found Fact Check Fails

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Just checked, last content posted to the home page was June 28th, 2016.

 

[knownerror]

(https://www.semrush.com/info/examiner.com) Might have something to do with it. Panda anyone?

 

[Calamari]

(https://www.semrush.com/info/examiner.com) Might have something to do with it. Panda anyone?

I doubt that very much. They still get tons of traffic. We will probably never know the full story or the truth about why they are going to stop accepting content.

The source article hints at lots of trouble with plagiarism and flat out bullshit reporting from contributors. Might have just been more trouble than it was worth or maybe something even more sinister.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Red lines indicate Panda... Looks like it could have been two instances of being hit by Panda, once immediately and once over a slower roll out.

It'd be idiotic to shut the door completely. They should analyze their top performing authors and keep them on board at a better pay rate. Identify the average authors and freeze their content and keep it live and keep paying out. Then just wipe everything related to below average authors, and 301 those pages to other related pages or back to the "authors" page en masse.

 

[SteveGG]

I saw this too and wondered why they couldn't keep it running with a million / millions of views still coming in every month. However the article I saw alluded to the parent company having another media / news site they were going to put more focus on, so perhaps they didn't want this old site cannibalizing its traffic(?).

On the plus side - it appears they may be removing the Examiner's content (re: screencap in Op advising their writers to preserve their work)... which opens up some possibilities with scraping the site (ie. older articles that appear prominently there for one of your site's keywords) and perhaps giving the resulting posts a light spin before adding them to your own website or a linking 2.0 / PBM, after confirming the originals do indeed get removed from Examiner.

 

[contract]

Interesting.

They deleted all their social profiles too.

 

[SteveGG]

However the article I saw alluded to the parent company having another media / news site they were going to put more focus on, so perhaps they didn't want this old site cannibalizing its traffic(?)

Found the article...

Examiner.com reported reaching 47 million unique users monthly at its high point. It still gets clicks from millions each month as it prepares to shut down.

“This was not a decision that was made lightly,” said Justin Jimenez, a spokesman for AXS, Examiner.com’s parent company. “We have been wanting to move the focus of our business to AXS.com, and now we’ve done that.”

In early 2014, Examiner.com became part of the content marketing operations at AXS, the Los Angeles-based media and ticketing arm of AEG Live, the concert and sports venue company owned by Anschutz.

Shuttering Examiner.com allows AXS to focus on a stable of about 1,500 staff and freelancers producing content about music, entertainment and culture on assignment from editors.​

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/b...er-com-to-shut-down-ending-new-media-run.html

 

[built]

Gonna suck for all the people who bought links on that site.

Unless they're still keeping the content up?

 

[SteveGG]

Just took a look and everything appears to redirect to the AXS homepage.
As of now, KW searches on Google with site:examiner.com still bring up results with the cached articles.

Past content still on Archive.org (for scraping etc) although it could disappear from there too eventually...

 

[backwoods]

Just took a look and everything appears to redirect to the AXS homepage.
As of now, KW searches on Google with site:examiner.com still bring up results with the cached articles.

Past content still on Archive.org (for scraping etc) although it could disappear from there too eventually...

Not everything, lol

If you enter http://examiner.com (without www) you'll get "503 Service Unavailable - No server is available to handle this request."

Sounds like it's one giant FUBAR going on over there...this email was sent to contributers 4 days after they announced they would be closing the doors.http://www.imediaethics.org/examine...ters-post-stories-even-though-closed-july-10/

 

[Steve Brownlie]

They're doing an interesting case study for us! Mega homepage 301 of a massive traffic domain...

Who votes:

Traffic gain by AXS from the 301 < Traffic lost from Examiner.com
Traffic gain by AXS less than the 301 > Examiner loss

or...

This is a whole mess, probably going to even lose traffic on AXS too

 

[Potatoe]

I figured if they kept the site up, it was because they realized that they weren't really gaining any momentum and they could just coast off of their existing traffic without having to pay editors and the rest of their staff. I can't imagine they were very 'lean', even thought writers were only paid for traffic to their articles. If a lot of their traffic to new articles was coming from people who originally landed on the site from older articles, they were essentially paying for traffic that they already had.

I figured if they took it down, it was some sort of liability issue, maybe not worth the headaches for Ryan Seacrest and Mark Cuban. Now if those two would leverage the massive followings of some of their athletes and musicians, they could have a top XX media site practically overnight imo.

 

[Calamari]

They're doing an interesting case study for us! Mega homepage 301 of a massive traffic domain...

Who votes:

Traffic gain by AXS from the 301 < Traffic lost from Examiner.com
Traffic gain by AXS less than the 301 > Examiner loss

or...

This is a whole mess, probably going to even lose traffic on AXS too

Just to keep this thread current, because it is interesting to watch; I found an examiner.com url that redirected to a completely unrelated category page. I imagine there are lot's more like it.

 

[contract]

Well, it's done.

Looks like Examiner.com 301 redirects to AXS.com

Dat Juice.

Also, when you go on the AXS site, which I assume sells tickets. There's no search by city/zip code or by band. Talk about a horrible UI decision... Compare that to Ticketmaster which points out your Geo at the top and then labels what the search is actually for in the right.