I don't read either as much as I used to, and I'll explain why quickly.<p>Mashable for me is often filled with very Fisher-Price-like news, as if it's written for an eighth grade reading level. Not to rag on him specifically, but I think Ben Parr's level of insight is negligible and just downright boring.<p>Techcrunch used to be more of interest to me because they covered, ya know, startups. I've said it before, and I have no data on the amount of stories about fresh startups, but it seems they have trailed off significantly in the last year.
Interesting- Mashable's #1 keyword isn't "Mashable"- it's "YouTube". Mashable is on page one of the search for YouTube, which gets... (looking up) 618 MILLION searches per month globally (source: <a href="https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal" rel="nofollow">https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal</a> ).
Funny, the graph matches my personal experience very closely. I switched to Mashable earlier this year after all the TC drama got in the way of the actual news.
Mashable's rise can attributed to being a selected friend on Twitter. When a Mashable story is released a lot of the times it becomes a trending topic on Twitter; not all, but I've seen this happen more times with them over Techcrunch.
Mashable plays the SEO game really well, they threw out tons of HOWTOs and "best of" articles when they first started. If you search for "download youtube videos" it's within the top 5 search results. TechCrunch played the same game for awhile but corporate drama is really just a much juicier topic to write about.<p>However, I've always found that if you want real startup news CenterNetworks still covers that. If you want general tech and media news Business Insider does a pretty good job, though they're heavily reliant on the Top 10 list format. GigaOm, when Om Malik writes his punditry, is pretty on the spot but the focus is broadband and communications than startups. I like ReadWriteWeb too. Point is: get your news and analysis from as many diverse places as possible.
Readwriteweb and Gigaom are way behind.<p>I like Mashable so I don't have any problem with that. It's just interesting to see how fast mashable's visitors are growing.