JohnCow was not JohnCow… I was right
JohnCow first told us that he didn’t sell the blog back in April but I had a sneaking suspicion that he did and the new owners along with the old owner were hiding the truth. The main reason why I believed this was because of the writing style change that occurred in the weeks after the “failed auction” on Sitepoint. So I set out to write a post about what I found but in the end decided not to post it.
So now here I am with a post I wrote back in May with a theory that JohnCow did in fact sell his blog and it turns out I was right! So even though someone that reads my post may say that I really didn’t know that the transfer occurred I wanted to share my theory anyway.
Here’s a screen cap of the draft I last edited in May.
Here’s what I had to say back in May:
I’ve been a subscriber to JohnCow for several months now. I always thought that the writer behind the blog offered nice tips written in a humorous way. Recently however, I’ve noticed a change in the tone of the writing on the blog like as if someone else is writing for it. While it’s hard for me to really provide specific examples of this in action, if you compare the style of the posts being written now with the posts written a couple month ago I believe there are many differences.
Now I’m sure many of you remember that JohnCow was up for sale on SitePoint a while ago and you may also remember that the blog was sold for $50k. A few days after the sale for the site went down for a couple days but it was announced shortly after that downtime that the bid was not legitimate and instead he would try to relist the auction. However, after that post nothing was mentioned about the blog sale. Why wouldn’t there be another post at or near the auction end date to try and stir up more interest? I believe that the blog was in fact sold but was cleverly hidden. The blog was relisted with a high reserve price (perhaps above the 50k amount so that if it was sold the new owner would be able to just flip it) to keep up the idea that it was still up for sale.
If the blog was sold than it makes plenty of sense that the new owner would not want anyone to know the original blog owner doesn’t write for it anymore because this would probably result in a drop in readership. But the part that really makes me think that the blog has a new owner is the shift in writing style. I can’t help shake the fact that the way the post are written now are done differently than they used to be. What do you think? Am I a conspiracy theorist or spot on?
Well it turns out I was right (maybe a little off on the date but there was a transfer that the new owner did not reveal) but it’s too bad I didn’t publish this post back before the cat was let out of the bag. If I would have published the post I probably could have stirred up a little controversy, seen a boost in traffic, and possibly force out the truth.
The one thing I’ve learned from this post is that next time I have something controversial to say I’ll publish first and deal with the potential fallout later.
good lesson in this post but just to set the record straight… we NEVER said the blog was not sold. Once we owned it we just skirted around the issue and made funny remarks. We wanted to be sure of a few things before we let the cat out of the bag and it was fun at the same time.
I am surprised you never did post about it though.
Hah hah, I know you didn’t flat out lie (even if you did I wouldn’t mind). Of course you had your reasons for why you worked the way you did and I think that was fine.
I was just really surprised when you revealed that the blog had in fact changed owners long before and wish I would have published this post even though I had my doubts.
I just didn’t want to call you out unless I was sure.
Either way it’s nice to know who the owners are behind it now though
You should have posted it back then, not that I don’t believe your or anything. I think a lot of us had suspicions.
Good post, nevertheless.
I was also on this boat, while the post was deleted their are some conversations on Blog Premiere about it coincidentally. I noticed the alexa and rss dropped slightly due to the change in style. I was worried at this point because the blog has become much more informative with the new owners than before, and do not get me wrong the original John Cow was great and very funny, but I have learned more from the new owners.
I think its great when something like this happens and I believe we havent seen the last of the original author as he has a talent for making some pretty amazing content as well.
It’s great to see who the new owners really are, although I had a couple of emails from business dealings with the new ones when they went public I think it made everyone happy.