CNET CEO Neil Ashe writes off Engadget

Check out this quote from a paidContent interview with CNET CEO Neil Ashe: “While others in the blogging community have anointed themselves as CNET competitors, the reality is that CNET is 20 to 50 times the size of any of those. CNET added more users in a month than the audience Engadget and Gizmodo combined have in total.” I’ll hold back the tub-thumping.

So I met Neil briefly last year shortly after the unfortunate ouster of Shelby Bonnie as CNET CEO; he seems like a very smart, friendly guy — which is probably why I was so surprised to hear he said this stuff. Neil’s either been drinking the Alexa / Comscore / Compete.com kool-aid or is feeling pretty defensive about CNET’s position in the market. Does anyone really think, at this point in the game, that Engadget isn’t competing with CNET on some level or another? Granted, Engadget isn’t really in the reviews game, or in daily TV shows or hipster hook-up social networks or anything else — but the competition isn’t self-anointment, it’s fact. We’re the leader in the consumer electronics news vertical — something CNET has always had huge stake in. Did CNET start its Crave gadget blog because it wasn’t feeling like there was direct competition with powerful alternatives like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc.?

Now, Engadget has about ten million unique readers; Gizmodo, I understand, has something like six or seven mil these days. While I don’t doubt that ten or twenty million uniques isn’t a business-shifting number for all of CNET’s dozens of properties, Neil isn’t exactly comparing apples to apples. Why not compare Crave or News.com to Engadget? Or compare all of AOL’s editorial properties to CNET’s? Maybe that’s because we’re still way ahead of anything anyone else has to offer. Then again, sometimes you never know — Neil, please feel free to prove me wrong!