I met Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian at a book signing recently. Alexis mentioned that Digg was all the rage in the press when Reddit was on the rise. I understand you saying that this company has a small audience, bad timing, and an insufficient hook. However, it seems that experts often make the same mistake over and over again. As Nassim Taleb would say, tech journalists appear to be Fooled by Randomness. They latch on to the Snapchats of the world and refuse to explore the hidden gems because they don't fit into the trendy, flashy mold.
He's just being honest and saying one will get more page views than another, not evaluating the merits of the underlying businesses. Perfectly rational since it's what he's been incentivized to care about.
There is more US IPO activity going on right now than makes the headlines. You really have to subscribe to an IPO specific news source or blog.
Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't read the S-1 and I don't know much about Zulily.
However, they have shown up as a top US display advertisers going back a year or more. Groupon was in the same spot, buying up massive quantities of inventory to fuel their growth. Before buying in take a close look at how much of their growth is purchased, along with the retention of those purchased users.
Other recent IPOs, like Retailmenot, have even deeper issues (almost complete dependency on free traffic from Google for trademark company names.)
Oh, there's a lot more to it than that. "Trendy and flashy" really is not a factor.
Reddit didn't get a lot of press attention because -- among other things -- the people behind it were not easy to find and talk with. (They still aren't.) If as a journalist I can't connect with you to, say, fact check something I'm writing, your chances of being covered are much lower.
Plus, when Reddit was on the upswing, there were a _lot_ of competing sites that were trying to be "Digg for [niche]," such as DZone as "digg for developers" and dotnetkicks as "digg for the .net people so we can be even more granular," and agileblend and so on. Not to mention older sharing sites like delicious (which is, um, still around?). So initially it seemed like "yet another link sharing site," and one that was far more confusing even to us tech press geeks.
In a way, this speaks to the concept of journalism in an echo chamber and being fooled by randomness. Ultimately, people (including journalists) are bad at prediction. The "accessible" founders that get noticed first get the press' attention. Next to market companies get labeled as [First mover] for [niche].
"Accessibility" has a lot to do with one's connections with journalists and perhaps location to some extent. It seems like a broken model is being used to determine what is newsworthy in tech.
I'd take location out of it. Just as good developers learn to communicate over distance (e.g. over IRC), so do journalists. I know remarkably few tech journalists who still live in the Bay Area.
