I don't know why you think anyone suggested every company on Earth should post links to their sites in comment threads. I am not every company on Earth. I am me. My comment was meant to demonstrate me talking as me. Not as anyone else.
I think the disconnect here is that you are assuming everything should scale infinitely. Ie: if one company posts, every company should post. If one company sends out spam emails, every company should send out spam emails. If one company tries to make their website #1 on Google for a given search, every company should do the same.
My whole point about talking to your target audience was meant to directly contradict this. Your target audience can only be a finite set of people, because you can only talk to a finite set of people. Otherwise, you're just producing noise and hoping someone will listen to it.
The point of the joke is that what works for you, won’t work for companies. Different goals, different reactions.
The irony to this whole thread is that CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development, which is how they decided which content to prune in the first place.
Citation needed. I can tell you about lots of companies that have existed for years. That I never found from Google.
> Different goals, different reactions.
I don't know what you mean by "reactions" here, but I don't think that their goals are good if they end up making what they produce worse in the eyes of their target audience in order to meet that goal.
> CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development
Some people are saying their audience is tens of millions of people, and others are saying their audience is "highly targeted". Which is it? Those two are claims are extremely incompatible.
Coming in with a discussion about CNET and then talking about your own personal website seems... misguided?
I don't know if CNET is making the right call here. But I can at least understand the logic and thought process they went through, however misguided it appears.
I think the disconnect here is that you are assuming everything should scale infinitely. Ie: if one company posts, every company should post. If one company sends out spam emails, every company should send out spam emails. If one company tries to make their website #1 on Google for a given search, every company should do the same.
My whole point about talking to your target audience was meant to directly contradict this. Your target audience can only be a finite set of people, because you can only talk to a finite set of people. Otherwise, you're just producing noise and hoping someone will listen to it.