AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Hmm, that's very specific wording there. In my world, filled with tax advisors and lawyers, this translates to "I'm trying to avoid paying California state income tax on capital gains I will accrue in the near future."
-- master's prediction http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1314487
The only place I've really seen the one year clock is just as something universities made up to keep their tuition price discrimination effective.
Likely an honest mistake, but what is news.ycombinator.net anyway?
You would need to login again because your cookie was set for .com not .net.
I just hope AOL won't kill it by injecting content from random Seed.com writers, similar to the way Demand Media turned eHow and LiveStrong into content beds. Sure the quality of TC isn't as great as it was in it's early days but it could a whole lot worse.
MG is one of the few TC writers who editorializes pretty liberally in his posts. I appreciate that as it makes it more interesting and it doesn't bother me as I happen to agree with most of what he says. To editorialize successfully requires you to have a strong grasp of the industry, the market forces and what direction it's moving in -- all of which I think he does quite well, along the likes of MA or Om Malik.
You may not like his writing but it's a far cry from a content farm. He's a writer. He's paid to write. That's what he does.
I have no idea why you have so many upvotes, and I guess I'm really surprised so many people agree with you.
Of course it's possible. The surprising number of votes would seem to indicate people agree with him. I don't know how many down-votes he's had though.
I must respectfully disagree with your conclusion that he has a strong grasp of the industry, market forces, or direction. I have a good deal of respect for both Arrington and Malik, and I cannot say I have one iota of the same for Siegler.
He is a writer, and he is paid to write. But the same can be said for the people producing articles for Demand Media. MG's prolific rate of content production doesn't inform its level of quality.
[1] A trivial example is this article: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my... where MG fails to differentiate between Twitter's CSS files failing to load and new features. I could find more if you'd like, but this is one of the more egregious from recent memory.
[2] http://plankhead.com/blog/1146/mg-siegler-destroys-the-engli...
In regards to his grasp of tech -- I see nothing offensive about your example. He says it's probably a bug, and it was. I think his ability to grasp the implications of tech is pretty solid.
Apparently we disagree, and perhaps I even hold the contrarian viewpoint in this community. At least you can cite your criticisms which is more than I expected. :-)
Not saying that means he shouldn't write, but as a webdev it's easy to see what's wrong with that article.
Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from Cops.
Edit: a journo friend of mine happened to mention to me that Simon is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, fwiw.
'Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from CSI.'
COPS, at least, is real. Well, sort of.
[edit- grammar]
You can hate all day long on MA, but there is no denying that he has done a lot for the startup community.
I think this signals MA's eventual departure from TC and that, to me, signals the end of TC's dominance in startup news.
A: When AOL wants to buy your blog.
Don't make the mistake of underestimating the new AOL. It's a profitable media empire that is growing rapidly and knows what it wants. It made $500mm in revenue last quarter.
Here's AOL's 10-Q filing last quarter: http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=irol-SECText&...
It's hard to parse because last quarter ended the first three month stretch AOL has had as an independent company from Time Warner. It contains a ton of information about the IPO and spinoff leading up to November 2009, but if you read carefully, you'll see that AOL made $557mm in revenue last quarter, had $495mm in normal expenses, and made a net profit before tax of $62mm. Sort of. These numbers are dubious because there was a $1.4 billion charge for "unusual expenses," including a write-off from the IPO for disintegration costs and a total write-down for Bebo.com.
The real balance sheet in the 10-Q from last quarter is further obfuscated by a $182mm stock purchase of AOL by Digital Sky Technology, the Russian investment firm that bought a chunk of Facebook a while ago. A few hundred pages are devoted to that and some calculations are skewed.
Together, the things above make it look like AOL as a business is unprofitable, but I don't think that's true.
We won't know how much the company really makes until its next 10-Q filing, but I am inclined to believe the backwards projections suggesting that AOL made profits during the four quarters prior to its IPO of $34.7mm, $1.4mm, $74mm, and $90.7mm.
- "A source close to the negotiations tells us AOL has tried to buy TechCrunch twice in the blog's five year history"
- AOL didn't execute purchase price @ $30m in 2009 because TechCrunch didn't fully own it's conference biz, that it's since seperate from Calacanis.
VIA -
http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-tried-to-buy-techcrunch-t...
a) Arrington has proven that the site can still grow even with him stepping back
b) The conference business is now theirs alone and that the value in Techcrunch 50 was Techcrunch, not Calacanis
c) They can convert their readers to conference attendees, party attendees, sponsors or almost anything else - a very large, loyal and well-off reader base.
A few ad and layout tweaks could see their ad revenue rise 30%+. I also don't know why they aren't allowing readers to fire up blogs and take the advertising. I also don't know why they aren't rolling up smaller blogs (like insidefacebook, some of the social gaming blogs etc.) using their stock+cash. With a year of solid work they could double ad revenue and then sell.
I'd hope AOL would keep it as a separate unit. But if not, and AOL changes it, it could be an opportunity to, uh, Disrupt Techcrunch as the market leader.
Maybe Facebook a few years back?
Those that have stood with one leg in the grave are usually pretty aware of the time they spend and how they spend it, I don't see Jobs letting up at all.
Disregarding the technicalities (Mr. Jobs owns only a small part of Apple's shares) the parent has a point in that if you're happy with what you're doing, no, if you love what you're doing and have financial stability already so that you don't need to worry about money, ceteris paribus, you might not want to sell your business. It might not make you any happier or your life any more meaningful. Of course, if you feel like doing something new, then it makes sense.
So I disagree. Not all businesses are for sale at the 'right' price. What are other's thoughts?
http://www.businessinsider.com/techcrunch-editor-arrington-h...
""It has been five years, and I can tell you, I am ready," he said."
But the right fit?
Some of the stuff Arrington writes would probably be struck by a sales / publicly traded editing bay yah?
Beyond that I would love to see a list of TechCrunch's most visited articles over the past year.
It might just be the HN bubble but I feel like 2/3 of the non-fluff stuff comes from arrington's deep connections.
And it doesn't just seem like Arrington playing "founder" rolling out the big news, it seems like genuinely developing from his passion for the tech space.
After his extended vacation a few years ago, and the thoughts he expressed on loving / hating / being exhausted w/TechCrunch I can't imagine he's going to stick around.
Examples of other blogs built on a founders passion that made it through an aquistion (EG discluding Weblogs topical gossip rags)?
TC very clearly announced to everyone that they no longer were going to accept unsolicited embargos. Their motive was that many of their competitors were breaking embargos by a few hours and then claiming it was accidental. The competitors that were breaking the embargo weren't being reprimanded by the PR firms, etc. at all. There was a clear advantage to breaking the embargo (more traffic, better ranking on news aggregators, etc.) and those who played fairly, like TC, were essentially being punished for it.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5024888/aol-wants-to-buy-techcru...
No doubt he will have a non-compete if he totally cashes out. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL
Or at least let dust grow and cover them.
What do you say?
Given how much stick MA gave entrepreneurs for not swinging for the fences in the angelgate panel this morning I would guess over $100m.