last rocketboom note, i swear ;)

So the unenlightened folk who say Amanda [Congdon] takes it all with her, well they don’t get what Rocketboom is.

This is something I echoed on a Digg post about this whole mess, to a certain degree. According to scripting.com, Andrew Baron “says that today (a weekend day on which RB doesn’t run new content) there were 1,390,661 successful page requests. That’s a bit of flow.” No shit!

Rocketboom is the vodcast equivalent to Digg — it’s about highlighting the really good stuff and then moving on. Despite what Amanda brought to the show, that’s why people will return it. Hell, just the curiosity around the new host will keep people subscribed (no such thing as bad publicity right?). Keeping the views up keeps the good submissions coming in. Keeping good content keeps users. Keeping the users keeps the funding coming in. It’s all very cyclical. Truth is, even the people who say Amanda was Rocketboom didn’t immediately unsubscribe from the feed when they heard the news — they’re just as interested to see what happens next as we are.

It’s certainly Andrew’s ball to drop, but unless he’s wholly incompetent, that’s not going to happen. RB has reached a certain institutional status like Fark and BoingBoing, and it takes some seriously bad decisions or an overwhelmingly better competitor to truly undermine something like that.