We founded Shiny Media as three freelance journalists back in 2004 and the sites were born out of a passion for the internet and a belief that established publishers just weren’t making enough of the medium. The early sites were launched because we loved blogs, we wanted to write about things that interested us, and we couldn’t find sites like Shoewawa and Shiny Shiny to write for.

So we created those sites ourselves, and we quickly realised that we were on to something. We’d never set up a publishing company before, and there wasn’t a UK blogging business template we could follow, so a lot of what we’ve built up has been learned along the way.

And we’ve certainly learned a lot since those early days of freelance. We now have a whole team of writers (eleven in house and many more freelance), some of whom have been with us since the very beginning. Fashion journalist and blogger Gemma Cartwright joined us back in November 2004 to start Shoewawa and The Bag Lady and now heads up our entire fashion team, bringing her own successful site, Catwalk Queen, with her. More recently, we have hired two more staff members this month, including Duncan, a staff writer on our oldest and biggest blog Tech Digest and Matt who joins us as an account manager, supporting our growing commercial team.

Revenue is going up month on month and traffic has increased 26 per cent over the last 12 months. So it seems ‘rumours of our death’ to paraphrase Mark Twain have been greatly exaggerated.

We read the article on Tech Crunch UK and the many comments below the feature and we thought we should respond to them here.

Design – Perhaps one of the biggest criticisms of our sites is that their design makes them difficult to navigate around and load. We hold our hands up. In a mad land grab last year, like kids in a sweet shop, we launched a large number of blogs in many verticals. We had tonnes of ideas, plenty of passion, and we couldn’t believe that publishers weren’t about to launch their own networks any day. In our enthusiasm to get our ideas online we were far too stretched to deal with very real problems around technology and design. But we’ve been working hard fix that, and a lot has already been done behind the scenes. Sheldon and Jess – our design team – have worked hard on updating and cleaning templates, fixing bugs and dealing with the vagaries of the Movable Type content management system. But with over 30 sites to deal with it’s taken time. The good news is that we had scheduled in a redesign for September anyway (honestly we had). Please feel free to e-mail us on info@shinymedia.com with your thoughts and examples of sites you like that we can take on board.

Advertising – As any publisher will tell you, there is always a fine line between advertising and editorial. Getting that balance right is a constant challenge and, while reader experience is and will remain our absolute priority, the commercial reality is that advertising is a necessary part of our business. We don’t just say yes to any advertising and work incredibly hard to maintain the balance. A key issue in our site re-design will be how advertising can be better integrated within the site without reducing the reader experience. Obviously an important concern of ours is the placement of Flash ads and the loading speed of the sites.

Text-based content – Perhaps one of the things we are most proud of is our high quality content. That’s probably because of our backgrounds as trained journalists. Some of the comments criticised Shiny content, grumbling it wasn’t as good as it used to be. But that’s where we would have to disagree. We have some great writers on board, some of whom are trained journalists, some of whom have got into blogging by less formal means. To us it doesn’t really matter. If you can write, have something to say and people want to read it then that’s fine by us, and Katie has been there from the very beginning to keep an eye on everyone and set the Shiny tone.

Although we got plenty of negative comments on the Tech Crunch article, we’ve had an awful lot more positive feedback from our readers. And while we’re always happy to take on board constructive criticisms, much of it seemed to stem from readers who just aren’t that into the Shiny style, which is fine – there’s plenty of space on the internet for everyone! We believe there are just as many bad print journalists out there as there are bad bloggers – though perhaps it’s true that more of them are hiding behind good sub-editors who are cleaning up their articles for them!

Video-based content – For Shiny one of the most exciting new areas, and one where we have seen massive growth, is video. It is still very early days, but we think we are producing some great quality stuff. Sure it’s not broadcast quality but it’s entertaining, full of personality and informative content for the web user – in other words the very embodiment of Shiny values. Some people seem to think that we encourage our presenters to expose their cleavage which is just a ludicrous accusation! There really isn’t any dress code, nor will there ever be. If staff want to wear a polo neck, a smock or a burka then it’s entirely up to them.

Finally, we do have our supporters. With such a gloomy intro to the Tech Crunch post, it’s not surprising that we attracted a lot of negative comments, and we’re certainly not dismissive of them. But there were positives too. There were people who felt we had achieved a lot in building a brand and an audience, and we thank them! We haven’t always got everything right, we know that, but we are working hard to deliver content that both readers and advertisers find compelling. We hope you’ll excuse our lack of British modesty when we say we think we’re doing pretty well at it!

Innovation in integrated advertising would be a step in the right direction, a focus on the visuals/design and context, a partnerhip between a network such as Shiny, the advertisers and ad creatives (yes us!!!).

On Gawker & Co, it kinda works, Gawker Artist is a great innovation, sublimating the banner zone with art, thus encouraging further exploration of other banner areas where the real adverts reside. There is an overall design aesthetic that really really works.

For too long tech and design creative have viewed each other with mutual distrust when, if they partnered up they’d realise their common interest was in working together to better woo the brands, ‘hey yeah we know our audience, let us design the adverts to go on the site?’.

Google are doing this with Seth MacFarlane and Cavalcade.

Let’s wake up and innovate, not bemoan US dominance.

Group of people that all know each other start infighting over fear of dwindling pot of business lottery wins.

How very web 1.0

Businesses succeed and fail everyday, external investment is always hard to get and a profitable company that is stable and operating in a difficult climate is a success not a failure.