Anne-Francoise Pele has taken over as the new editor for the EE Times Automotive DesignLine – the one tied to EE Times US, rather than EE Times Europe. Whilst it is good to see EE Times Group strengthening their editorial teams around the DesignLines, it does appear that this is also another move in the EE Times v. EE Times Europe online battle, as EBP continues to publish the European Automotive DesignLine.
I’m not sure what this is going to mean in the long term, as it seems pretty clear that EE Times Group (the publishers of EE Times US) is trying to pull global traffic to their sites, and in Europe it seems that their biggest opportunity is to pull readers from EBP’s (the publisher of EE Times Europe) sites.
To be honest I’ve absolutely no insight into how the situation developed, but with the greater resources available to the American publisher, it’s going to be very difficult for the sites associated with EE Times Europe to maintain their traffic. I know traffic figures fell significantly after the switch to the electronics-eetimes.com – which isn’t surprising with such a domain name change – but it will be interesting to see if they can regain the previous high levels of traffic in the medium term.