A very good question. Will they be really able to resist "Poxxer, who we broke the news on in 2011 here and here" ...pfft always hate that <a><a><a> start to a blog post.

If they really would drop startups that made it big they could make it a feature. Instead of a deadpool, they can add startups to a bigpool, and tease the major sites with it: "we followed them then, you follow them now"