seems to me that mashable is more consumer/enthusiast oriented, while TC caters to people in the industry. or as the SAT would put it, TC:Mashable -> HN:Digg
It makes sense that they eventually got a larger audience than TC, since there are more enthusiasts than pros.
I unsubscribed from Mashable a year ago for two reasons that infuriated me:
1) Posts from one author who constantly insulted readers by calling them idiots if they didn't side with him regarding his politics (in any case, the posts were usually only tangentially related to technology).
2) Posting lists like "The top 10 ways to do XXXXXX online," often forgetting the most important and useful sites for the purpose. They never go back and update their lists based on user feedback, even if hundreds of people point out obvious mistakes or omissions.
Of course they are welcome to choose whom to put on their lists, but it seems that they just pick 10 rather carelessly to get the post out as soon as possible.
TC may have an acerbic vibe, but they seem to direct it at companies and other sites, not their readers.
if we could measure influence, Mashable wouldn't even come close.
It seems 55% of Mashable traffic is coming in from search engines. If you look at their homepage, they are obviously heavily optimized for keywords like 'youtube', 'myspace' etc. (I got my stat from compete pro, cant link)
As a tech/valley person, I keep up with TC a few times a day but Mashable doesn't interest me at all. I am sure I am not alone.
It is pretty impressive to me that they are on the front page for huge keywords like that and explains why Mashable can have such high traffic numbers with so much less influence than Techcrunch. Most of the people searching for youtube and myspace and showing up in these statistics do not care about Mashable and will never visit again.
I wonder how much less it costs to advertise on Mashable because the traffic is so much less valuable than Techcrunch's traffic.
I like TechCrunch better, I think. But TC has an acerbic vibe that might put people off. If only we could tell who had the higher value readers.