Michael Arrington has announced the launch of the newest addition to his growing stable of blogs – CrunchGear – a site about gadgets. Arrington says it will be unique. I hope so, because this space is awfully crowded with sites – blogs and otherwise – trying to get a taste of the webvertising dollars aimed at toy-boys 15-30 year old toy-obsessed young men.
It’s interesting that Arrington is growing his network with a conscious effort to keep everyone under the same brand – naming, design, look-and-feel, etc. For my part, brand is largely irrelevant to the media choices I make, unless the property falls squarely under the genre under which I’ve gotten to know the brand in the first place. I wonder if that’s because in the creative space success is so hit and miss. The only gadget sites I read I’ve chosen because of the particular voices involved – if they go, I go. So my instinct is that consistent branding is of dubious value.
In any event, I’ll be curious to see whether the Arrington name brings traffic to this site for any reason other than the initial buzz and overt attempts to push traffic to it from his other sites.
One last note. Arrington says he’s announcing two more sites in the next while. Did someone change the clocks on the west coast and add a few more hours into each day? Extraordinary.