Ask HN: Has Techcrunch Just Joined DeadPool?

[tzury]

I am trying to think how would techcrunch look from now on, being owned by AOL. Every time I read about an AOL aucqisition, I look at the Acquisition list at Wikipdia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL) and try to figure where have been all those great innovative companies gone? Well, some are just were not great at the first place, but some were definetly greatest at the time of acquisition.

ICQ was never the less a revolutionary one, the first IM to catch millions of users, yet, it took two or three years for ICQ to be far behind MSN, Skype and GMail Chat. Let alone recent social netwroking revolution where ICQ is not a even player in the game.

Winamp (from nullsoft) - The greatest music player, where is it now? Where is Itunes or any other web based music services and where is Winamp?

XDrive - Dropbox anyone?

And the list goes on, take a look on the list and tell which one have grown up and more popularity ever since it was acquired by AOL.

Another issue raisd with this purchase is simply conflict of interests.

Can we rely on a review published by a domninant player? Techcrunch is very good at reviewing startups, web products and services, Techcrunch was so far quite reliable and trustworthy.

I think it was for its own good that the crunchpad have not made it finally as integral part of techcrunch, since this gave readers the feling that a review of an iPad/HP/Dell/Smasung pads is neutral and blanaced. If Techcrunch itself were manufacturing pads, no one would have think, ipad review on techcrunch is worth reading.

But this is not the case anymore.

Would love to get our great community opinions on this issues and in general, about "making an exit", knowing your baby startup is about to die in the new owners hands.

[carlos]

I think that Techcrunch will enter the DeadPool once Mike Arrington leaves (2-3 years).

[markkat → carlos]

I am apt to agree. I think Arrington is TechCrunch; the dependency is akin to Apple and Jobs. Soul matters.

[lachyg → carlos]

Mike left for 2-3 months before, and traffic only increased.

[davidedicillo]

Their blogs acquisition seems doing pretty well, look at engadget

[tzury → davidedicillo]

1 out of 50 makes 2% of success, that is very very low rate

[davidedicillo → tzury]

Well then you could tell that Google is a failing company because many of their projects aren't successful and they are actually (immensely) profitable only on with few of them. What I meant is if you look specifically to their blog networks acquisitions they are pretty successful.

[tzury → davidedicillo]

AOL Mkt cap is currently 2.66B. Putting aside its annual income over the years and the capital invested in it.

If you look at the acquisition list you will see around $10B have been spent on acquisitions.

Say, a company that buys so many companies for so much money and ends up with such low market capital, then the company if a failure, indeed!

[kgermino]

I don't think that it's fair to compare the AOL of old (Before May 2009) to the current company. There have been a lot of changes happening there in the last year.

That being said I will be paying attention to see what happens and I'll be interested to see how AOL handles some of the issues that will inevitably come up.

As far as the making an exit knowing that your company will likely die, I don't think that applies in this case, MA and staff will still be around, and it seems like the deal is structured so that in general not much will change. Its the marginal issues that I would be more worried about.

[nl]

AOL is a very different company since Tim Armstrong took over (March 2009). He has a genuine vision for what AOL will become, and the acquisitions since he took over are all about getting there.

It's not clear yet if his strategy is going to work out, but like Arrington said when he announced the takeover - everyone knows what he's trying to do.

[tzury]

clickable link to the list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

[tzury]

if we think about another acqiositin they have made this week, they paid $65M for "5min" a site which curently have 200K videos! that is far too much by all means.

[jw84]

You're looking at this in a wrong way, suggesting you haven't been paying attention to Internet business in the past year.

You're looking at AOL and its acquisitions. Aol is an expanding company with a wide portfolio of content sites that aren't clearly branded but play to a mainstream audience. Aol has a new corporate culture and executives that know what they're doing. The line being toed right now is that they're going to be hands off and TC will just exist, but with more backend support.

Great, whatever.

The first thing you have to consider is in press, the tech niche especially, these sites to make overhead by playing mouthpiece to publicists from well-funded startups intent on buying their way into success.

In the valley, PR people are the second scummiest people--tech recruiters are the worst. Fun fact, when you go to most tech parties in the valley the only hot girls inevitably are PR or TR.

But that's where the money comes from, you play nice with PR puff pieces and you get access. You get access and you get views. You get views and you get paid. Disrupt that chain and you can't hire people to write. This has been the problem with journalism since the first cave man went outside the cave, saw a dinosaur, and had to come back to report to others.

So with Aol onboard, sales targets to hit, with share-holders to be accountable to, will TC be beholden to PR more or less?

My optimist side says less, because MA and crew can now focus less on tech BS and ad sales to write better stories. But my realist said says more. Because money is good and even when you try hard there's only so many stories that's interesting, so hence excess churn.

It doesn't really matter. There's enough competing sites and re-telling of the same stories.

[lsc → jw84]

I agree with most of what you said, I modded you up, but I take issue with one section:

"In the valley, PR people are the second scummiest people--tech recruiters are the worst. Fun fact, when you go to most tech parties in the valley the only hot girls inevitably are PR or TR."

Unless by "hot" you really mean "well dressed" I disagree, and am somewhat offended. I've met plenty of attractive, competent technical women here in the valley.

On the other hand, if you restructured that to say something like:

"In the valley, PR people are the second scummiest people--tech recruiters are the worst. Fun fact, when you go to most tech parties in the valley the best dressed people inevitably are PR or TR."

I'd agree. Technical people tend to dress down, and when they do dress up, they tend to not be that good at it. Dressing up is an integral part of the PR/sales job role, so obviously, they are going to be better at it than we are.