Well, it’s now official - we’ve handed over Ausdroid to new operators, and going forward, we will no longer have anything much to do with it (except perhaps posting a few outstanding reviews to clear the decks).
What’s this mean for the audience?
In the short term, probably nothing. Ausdroid will continue to exist, and will share content from time to time. We don’t know much about the intentions of the new operator, besides keeping the website online for a time, but we understand it will continue to run.
What’s this mean for the team?
Many of the familiar faces you knew as Ausdroid have already moved on in recent years. Dan Tyson and Scott Plowman have moved on to EFTM, Jason’s focusing elsewhere, and Phil’s focusing on his career and writes a little for Image Matrix Tech (Hi, Djuro!). Duncan, Alex, David and other Scott haven’t been especially active of late, and probably won’t be doing technology journalism going forward.
As for me? I’ll be writing a few things now and then at Chris Talks Gadgets (i.e. this website), including reviews, things of interest and other thoughts. Necessarily, I guess, I expect the audience to be a bit smaller.
What does this say about the independent technology media niche?
I’m not 100% sure.
I think what we can say is that independent media has been in trouble for a while, and in the technology space, that’s not all that different. There are some independent media outlets in Australia which are undoubtedly successful in some measure - The Guardian is a stalwart of independent media coverage more generally, and in the technology space, you’ve got the likes of Tech Guide, Image Matrix Tech, EFTM, Cyber Shack and so on.
While these I’ve named seem to be turning some commercial success - I mean, they’ve been around quite a long time and continue to be so - undoubtedly they’re facing the same kind of crunch that Ausdroid faced, and ultimately which led to its demise.
Advertising buyers just aren’t looking at independent media the way they did - on-site display advertising is kind of a dead end, far from its heyday when it could make tens if not hundreds of thousands for the wily site operator. These days, it might pay some pocket money or sponsorship here and there … but nowhere near as lucrative as it once was.
Equally, the kinds of things which made independent technology journalism worthwhile - if not for financial reasons - seem to have long ago withered away. Gone are the years where brands would take a veritable army of journalists around the world to cover their events; I lost count of how many Aussie tech journos attended the likes of Mobile World Congress, IFA, Computex and even Google IO back in the day … whereas these days, I’d wager only a very small number go, and probably not in the same luxury they once did.
The internet isn’t what it was five or ten or even fifteen years ago, and so the landscape has changed significantly. It’s harder to get eyes on your content. Google was perpetually changing its SEO algorithms to make it harder to surface your content. Nowadays, most search engines “helpfully” offer AI powered answers at the top of most search results, meaning that there’s even less reason to click through to content - why would I read someone’s page about how to fix a particular issue when a) the content is mostly regurgitated rubbish anyway, and b) the AI can digest it for me and produce a simple bulleted list which solves my problems and I can get on with my day?
Search is dead in many respects .. there’s few things that AI doesn’t do better here.
Don’t even get me started on AI content writing; gone are the days when you can read an article and know that some hard working journalist put it together for you. Most articles I read these days feel like they might’ve been scaffold-ed by a human, and then fleshed out by an AI. This ultimately makes a lot of content not worth reading … and that assumes that this content is on a website not overrun with ads, popups and other bullshit which makes reading the *actual *content nigh on impossible.
Usually, the opposite is true - it’s AI written trash, filled to the brim with ads, popups and other nonsense, with JavaScript that hijacks your browsers behaviour and inserts more shit content into your eyes whenever you dare to try and navigate away.
Honestly, in 2025, I have no idea why anyone would start a new independent media effort – the money isn’t there, the work is slavishly hard and thankless, and there’s really no incentive at all. It’s a sad state of affairs, and one of many reasons why we’ve decided the time is right to hand Ausdroid off to someone else to run, and we can move onto bigger and better things.